Assignment #2 - Taylor Galavotti - iActuallyRead

It would be practically impossible for me to list all of the books I've read in the past year, but I'll give you the highlights. I read Dante Alighieri's Inferno, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Jean Paul Sartre's No Exit at an academic camp over the summer where I took a class dedicated to the afterlife. That experience was more than eye-opening for me, and those pieces of literature only enhanced it.

Dante's Inferno was a poem that I had always been meaning to read but never got around to it because of various other priorities. The work gave me insight into 14th century Florence as well as the early Roman Catholic church which I didn't know much about. Learning about Dante Alighieri was also interesting because of his tumultuous life story.

The next book we read was John Milton's Paradise Lost. Though John Milton was an awful, and I mean awful, person, the book was absolutely stunning. The writing flowed beautifully as it told the story of the Great Battle of Heaven as well as the Fall from it. The context for this book also proved intriguing as it was written during the time Oliver Cromwell's revolt was happening in England.

The final book we read was actually a short play written by frenchmen Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit. In order to best understand this text, we actually took on the four roles established in the play as a class and performed the play in small sections. This was the easiest of the three to comprehend in terms of the syntax, it was the most difficult in terms of metaphor, as the entire play was a metaphor for an Existentialist's Hell. The play was riveting and even though there were only four characters, it was quite hilarious.

All three of these books revolved around the same theme, which is not bad at all, doesn't truly represent my taste in literature. In the past year, I've read countless mystery novels, one of my favorites being John Darnton's The Experiment. I've also reread quite a few of my favorites, such as the Harry Potter series and the Lunar Chronicles.

As for books I've put down, the first one that comes to mind in Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect. The book was incredibly dense with psychological information, so much so, that the small allotments of time I can find the read, I couldn't completely understand what was happening because of the intensity of the jargon. I unfortunately had to put it down simply because I could never find the proper headspace to truly read the book. I am hoping to pick it up again over winter break when I *fingers crossed* don't have too much homework and can simply pick it up and have all of my brain dedicated to the book.