Friday, March 20, 2009

Listlessness

I'm now in the process of trying to come up with a list of all the books on French (and, when appropriate, non-French) Jewish history that I've read, read chapters from, or am-about-to-read-any-minute-now, labeling them accordingly. Using a list from a reading course, one of what I currently have out of Bobst, and the works-cited pages of term papers, I'm putting something together, but is it right? This is challenging for several reasons:

1) If a book is about German Jewry but very close to my topic, does it 'count'?
2) If I read a book and even wrote a paper about it two (four) years ago, when I was reading for a different idea and inadvertently not paying attention to information relevant to what I'm now interested in, does that book count as 'read'?
3) Academic articles are not books. But should they still be listed?
4) Do novels I read primarily for the 'history' aspect go on the 'history' list, even though they're novels?
5) Is what I've come up with so far really all I've read on this topic? How embarrassing!

3 comments:

Withywindle said...

Include everything, label as accurately as you can?

Anonymous said...

Don't you have a faculty adviser? If a PhD student of mine had questions like this (well, math questions are different, we don't read that many books, but still), she/he would be in my office talking about it.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Withywindle,

Good suggestion.

lgm,

Of course I do. There are plenty of professors who will need to be consulted. These were just questions I had on the matter had during spring break, when no one's in their offices. Fear not, I'm not taking the word of blog readers over those of the relevant faculty!