We no speak Americano

Fact: It is incredibly hard to convince oneself that groceries are needed when there's almost a full bag of cocoa pebbles sitting on top of my fridge.

Another Fact: This week is going to be killer. Four of my six classes are intensive reading, so that means four research papers, ten pages each about surrealism and psychoanalysis and prostitution in the 18th century and so so much more. Not to mention that the novel reading in all of those classes doesn't exactly get put on the back burner amidst all that paper writing.

While I love my classes, I have to say that Dr. Giles' class has yet to disappoint when it comes to the novels she chooses. RIght now we are in the middle of Corelli's Mandolin, and the writing in it is absolutely breathtaking. Listen to this excerpt, Greek's recount of World War I

"I said it was Pelagia and the sense of beauty that got me home, but I have said nothing about the sense of beauty. Once, near the Mesovon pass, in December, when it was twenty degrees below zero beacuse there was no cloud, the Italians sent up a starshell. It exploded in a cascade of brilliant blue light against the face of the full moon, and the sparks drifted to earth in slow motion like the souls of reluctant angels. As that small magnesium sun hovered and blazed, the black pines stepped out of their modest shadows as though previously they had been veiled like virgins but had now decided to be seen as they are in heaven. The drifts of snow pulsed with the incandescence of the absolute chastity of ice., a mortar coughed disconsolately, and an owl whooped. For the first time in my life I shivered physically from something other than the cold; the world had sloughed away its skin and revealed itself as energy and light.

It is my wish to get well so that I can go back to the lines and experience, perhaps only one more time, that immaculate moment when I saw the face of Gabriel in an instrument of war."

Another favorite, on the light on a Greek island

"It exposes colours in their original prelapsarian state, as though straight from the imagination of God in His youngest days, when He still believed that all was good."

Also, check this kid out, just 19 and mixin it up like a pro.