cosmic_celery

Today, I accidentally ordered a book from the German Amazon site while trying to see how much shipping would cost. Oops. Sometimes I amaze myself with how easy it is to make mistakes like that.

Well, now I'll have a shiny new copy of Die Blendung by Elias Canetti heading my way to wonder over and attempt to read. I've been trying to read through the English version (re-titled Auto-da-fe) for a while now, but I keep putting it down in favor of other things. I'm not sure if it's the book itself, or if it's just the translation, but I've been finding it a really confusing read.

Despite my confusion, I would definitely recommend it. The main character is a misanthropic collector of books, who is suddenly thrust out into the world. From there, the first person he meets is a chess-obsessed midget who is married to a prostitute nicknamed The Capitalist. From then on, it just gets stranger.

I met with a counselor this week to discuss my GPA (poor) and how we can go about changing that so I can transfer over to UCSD in the future. One of the things I definitely have to do is re-take a few classes. Not surprisingly, considering recent internet mistakes, this includes German. I'm wondering, though, if I should take German 2 again, or if I should go all the way back to German 1. For UCSD English degrees, you have to eventually be proficient in another language, which means up to conversational level...which I'm not especially looking forward to. Languages themselves fascinate me, and I think German is fun, but language classes always set my teeth on edge because of how much participation and random-calling-ons always seem to be involved.