Last RMST post!

Finally we’ve finished the year and done with this class! This semester flew by so fast compared to the first and I’m not complaining at all. I can’t wait to go back home and enjoy our 4 month long summer!!

Overall this course was definitely interesting since it’s so different from my other courses. Having to read so many books in such a short amount of time was really challenging for me since I’m not a big reader and I would never usually read the books we were required to read. But this class allowed me to broaden the genres of books I’ve read and through our weekly lectures, learn a bit more about romance literature. A majority of the books we read covered the themes of memory, nostalgia, identity etc. But I think my favourite book throughout our course would be Death with Interruptions by José Saramago. I really really liked the lecture format we got from Tesi and Daniel, it was so refreshing and it was so much more fun and engaging being able to discuss a lot of topics in groups. I was also surprised this novel would end up being my favourite out of all of the ones I’ve read since I normally enjoy more romance related novels and we definitely had a wide variety of that. I think just the concept of the novel really intruiged me since I’ve never even had the thought of days without people dying occur.

For the least favourite novel of this course, I think it might be the first book we read Marcel Proust’s “Combray”. It might be because it was the first book of the year and it wasn’t really memorable to me, but after reading my blog and getting a refresh on the novel, I just remember it being a more difficult and challenging read compared to the other novels we had and it was honestly a hard book for me to even finish reading. I didn’t find the novel interesting except some of the strange relations he had with his mother but that was really all. I enjoyed the format of writing these blogs after every novel we read since it really allowed us to express our opinions on the book freely and more causally. I didn’t have to stress too much about needing to write the blog super formally.

Discussion Question: What were your favourite and least favourite books throughout this course? What was your favourite part about this course?