Looking Ahead

On Thursday, I got my first two law school acceptances from NYU and Duke! Due to the 10-day Priority Track cycle Duke put my application into, I had been expecting a reply sometime around Thursday, but I was surprised by a call from NYU letting me know I was in. So much excitement, especially over the completely unexpected response from NYU! I still have quite a few schools to hear back from, but NYU was among my top choice law school and at this point, Columbia (at par with NYU) and possibly Berkeley (West Coast…) are the only other schools I’d consider picking instead.

So needless to say, this is a major change in outlook for me. Looking back over the last few months, it’s quite interesting to watch how my view of the future and future plans shifted. After my first disappointing LSAT experience, I wasn’t even sure if law school was going to happen this coming year, and I started fretting about what I might do in the gap year. The trouble was, nothing particularly appealed to me, and I found myself (very) half-heartedly researching options to teach abroad, attending career fairs, and scoping around for other possible options. I probably spent quite a bit of fall quarter in an unpleasant cloud of worry and uncertainty. After I got my score from the December LSAT, I could more reasonably expect to be in law school for the next year, but I wasn’t expecting how amazing it feels to have a good option (or two) for next year established :) 

When I visited the campus over the summer, I remember walking through the law building feeling that I couldn’t imagine being done with this large, daunting prospect of taking the LSAT and getting into a law school. Now that I’m on the other side looking back, it feels so good to be done! I’ve been blown away by all the support, genuine well-wishes and congratulations I’ve gotten in the last few days, and over the past year. From my professors who’ve shown their support through letters of recommendations and encouragement, to my family, to all of my friends who have motivated me both through being there as willing listeners and through being inspiring, driven, intelligent people in their own right, I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people. I’ve still got to figure out scholarships, financial aid, living arrangements and, of course, law school itself, but right now, I’m enjoying taking a justified deep breath, and relaxing. 

2012 in Books

1. Best book you read in 2012? Two-way tie between “Atonement” by Ian McEwan, and “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger. I just love those two books with a passion of, well, a senior thesis :)

2. Book you were excited about and thought you were going to love more but didn’t? “Sexing the Cherry” by Jeanette Winterson. It had been compared to “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood (and a personal favorite of mine), which had me excited at first. It ended up being too heavy-handed and angry with its “men are abusers and they will never understand us, ever” mantra and I was annoyed by it instead.

3. Most surprising book of 2012? “A Storm of Swords” by G.R.R. Martin, for reasons that will be very apparent to anybody who has read that book. I did not expect that plot twist, and it make me love G.R.R. Martin for doing that with his characters. For those same reasons, I can’t wait for the next season of Game of Thrones, and the reaction from viewers :) 

4. Book you recommended to people most in 2012? I’d have to say “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger for this one. Mostly due to my honors thesis; the other two novels had been read in during one of the previous seminars, but this text was self-selected for my topic. As such, I constantly recommended it to everybody any time I talked about my thesis. 

5. Best series you discovered in 2012? “A Song of Ice and Fire,” followed by “The Hunger Games.”

6. Favorite new authors you discovered in 2012? G.R.R. Martin (of course), and Gregory Maguire 

7. Best book that was out of your comfort zone or was a new genre for you? “The Woman in Black” by Susan Hill. It was one of my first forays into the Victorian gothic/horror genre and I liked it well enough. 

8. Most thrilling, unputdownable book in 2012? Going to have to go with “The Hunger Games” for this one. I read all three books, one after the other, in the span of five hours during spring break. Even for books I like, I rarely do this. I’m more of a read-books-bit-by-bit type of person. 

9. Book you are most likely to re-read in 2013? Any of the three texts I wrote my thesis on. (“Atonement”, “History of Love”, “Time Traveler’s Wife”) Add “Wicked” to that list, though I’m unlikely to read it cover-to-cover again.

10. Favorite cover of a book you read in 2012? I really liked the cover art for my copy of Kafka’s “The Trial”. 

11. Most memorable character in 2012? Elphaba. Fierce, enigmatic, and philosophical. Lonely, vengeful, independent, vulnerable. She runs the full spectrum of emotional states and she makes for a fascinating protagonist. 

12. Most beautifully-written book read in 2012? “Atonement.” So wonderfully, intricately written, I don’t even. “The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation- it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.” Just the interiority in his prose is amazing. 

13. Book that had the greatest impact on you in 2012? “Game of Thrones.” To recap, I loved epic, medieval fantasy back in the day, but I’d largely fallen out of the genre for a while. I still liked urban fantasies like “Harry Potter,” “Dresden Files” and “Neverwhere,” but I had largely stopped reading high fantasy. I picked up “Game of Thrones” because the TV show was out and everybody was reading it. Fell straight back into loving high fantasy, started playing World of Warcraft again, and finished the book in three days. So there you have it. 

14. Book you can’t believe you waited until 2012 to finally read? “Wicked: Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” So worth it.

15. Favorite passage/quote from a book you read in 2012? “She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.” Ian McEwan, Atonement

16. Shortest and longest books you read in 2012? Shortest; “On Chesil Beach” by Ian McEwan. Longest; possibly one of the G.R.R. Martin books?

17. Book that had a scene in it that had you reeling and dying to talk to somebody about it? The coda ending of “Atonement. That is, if spending an hour discussing it with my honors seminar counts as "talking to somebody about it.”

18. Favorite relationship from a book you read in 2012 (be it romantic, friendship, etc). Elphaba and Fiyero. Make no mistake, I love them together in the musical, but my goodness. Their story arc and relationship in the novel was incredibly-written. Romance with a good bit of angst, with long and insightful political and philosophical discussions. Elphaba gets her little bit of happiness, and she never forgets it. “And though she could not tried not to sleep, on occasion, she could not help it; her dreams brought Fiyero closer and closer to home.” (Wicked, page 390) 

“Atonement” and “The Time Traveler’s Wife” get honorary mentions. It would have been an impossible three way tie, but I’ve already spent three months of my life writing my honors thesis on the nuances in Robbie and Cecelia and Henry and Clare’s relationships and blogged fairly extensively on them as well. But seriously. Any author considering writing about relationships should read these three novels and take note. They show three very different romantic relationships and portray them with such pathos and humanity. 

*NB: I don’t consider romantic relationships to be the most important or special type of relationship to portray, but I do consider them to be the most easily portrayed terribly, particularly because they’re far and away the most popular. That’s why my respect meter goes up so high when an author is able to write a good one, despite everything.

19. Favorite book you read in 2012 from an author you read previously. “Sentimental Education” by Flaubert. I read “Madame Bovary” a while back. 

20. Best book you read that you read based solely on a recommendation from somebody else? “On Chesil Beach.” It was recommended to me by a professor for the topic of my undergraduate research symposium presentation. It was enjoyable and relevant to my research. So glad it was recommended to me.

21. One book you didn’t get to in 2012 but will be your priority in 2013? “A Feast for Crows” and “A Dance with Dragons,” at least, before I spoil anymore plot points for myself. Following that, J.K. Rowling’s new novel, and more of Gregory Maguire’s works.  

22. One thing you hope to accomplish or do in your reading/blogging in 2013? Quite simply, keep reading and keep blogging about literature. I’m technically done with the English major and while I could still take more classes just for interest, it’s likely that my days of being assigned reading and writing research papers on literature are behind me. That said, I firmly believe that reading literature intelligently and critically is a good thing. 

2012

Celebrating New Year’s Eve with friends was particularly bittersweet this year. I’ve celebrated with the same group of people for all four years of college, some of them longer, and it occurred to me that evening that 2013 is going to be a year of change. Getting new jobs, going to graduate school, moving to different parts of the country; I’m excited for the change, but at the same time, college flew by and it’s a strange feeling to think that those four years are nearly over and we’ll all be in different places by this time next year.

2012 was an eventful year. I dropped the music major and threw myself into the English major, winning two scholarships. I started doing research in the humanities, presented at the research symposium, realized that I loved contemporary literature, and spent three months writing an honors thesis on three of my favorite novels. I studied for, and took the LSAT, which temporarily became quite a large part of my life. I re-discovered a love for the fantasy genre with “A Song of Ice and Fire” and reminisced  like crazy waiting for “The Hobbit” to be released. I started tutoring at CLUE and met an entirely wonderful group of co-workers and friends there. I’ve also kept a blog going over a year for the first time in my life.

Next year, I’ll hopefully be in law school somewhere in the country and my life will be very different once again. I started off 2013 appropriately: throwing an impromptu Hobbit-themed party at my apartment. Lots of food, wine, one of my friends skyping in, and watching “Fellowship of the Ring”. In the next few days, I received my LSAT score two days earlier than expected, threw myself into law school applications, and went on an unexpected trip to Victoria with a handful of friends (more on that forthcoming). It seemed like a good way to start a year that’s going to be, for the most part, unexpected and unpredictable.