My Introduction

Hello everyone!

My name is Carlina and I’m a student in the MA French Studies program. I grew up in Montreal, but I have lived in Vancouver for a while now. I am very much looking forward to this course, since it is a bit of a change from the French courses that I’ve been taking in my master’s program. I like variety, and so I was very pleased to find out that there was a Romance Studies course available for graduate students this semester.

I am a slow reader, so I know it will be a bit of a challenge for me to read as much as we will be reading for this course. When I was a child, I fell in love with reading. I would spend most of my free time reading. But I was bullied a lot and made fun of by my peers, not just for being nerdy, but for a few different reasons. For a few years, I didn’t have any friends at school, and I would spend most of my time alone, even at home. Eventually, when I was in grade 9, I completely stopped reading because I was tired of being made fun of and outcasted by everyone at school. After rejecting reading and all other nerdy stuff, I finally made friends. It is unfortunate that I had to give up one of my favourite hobbies and biggest passions in life in order to finally be accepted by my peers. For a few years, I refused to touch a book and didn’t bother reading the books that we were assigned to read in school. Finally, once I was done school and I entered the workforce, I started reading again. It honestly made me so happy.

In this course, I am very excited to delve into the world of long books. One of the topics that I am interested in, which we discussed during the first class, is how we are now in what can be referred to as a “culture of fragments”. I have noticed that most people I know spend much more time looking at content on social media rather than picking up a book. I think that the prevalence of social media has had a very negative impact on peoples’ attention spans. Many people I have spoken to have mentioned that they find reading fiction to be a “waste of time”. I am really hoping that reading novels will eventually become popular again, since there is so much that someone can experience when they are immersed in a story and transported to another world.

For the book of my choosing, I will be reading Les guerriers de l’hiver by Olivier Norek. I chose this novel because I love reading French literature (hence the reason why I’m in French Studies) and because it takes place during WWII, which I find to be a fascinating, although disturbing, period of history. I am excited to start reading this book, along with The Savage Detectives, which will be the first novel I’ve ever read by a Latin American author.

I am looking forward to reading all your blog posts throughout the semester!

Carlina