So go on and bury me, I'll find mine underneath

I am SO F*CKING DONE WITH GULAG! YEAH! GO ME!

For all those reading this that aren't Rae:
The very worst part of summer for next year's AP English students was reading a little book called The Gulag Archipelago. This book was nearly 500 pages long, torturous, and we had to write 25 flipping essays on it.

And I just finished the 25th one.

A major annoyance and topic of communal kvetching was the fact that, despite 23 of the 25 essays prompting us to respond to and explain quotes from the book, exactly 4 of them had page numbers attached.

That's right. We got to go treasure hunting through a 476-page book for one-sentence quotes.

And this was not a fun long book, like Lonesome Dove. That one was 940 pages, but it was actually readable. No, Gulag tells the "story" of how millions of people in Stalinist Russia were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, sent to hard labor camps, tortured some more, degenerated morally, and killed. Yay!

But it's all OVER now.


I worked out a little theory. Every summer, we get one ridiculously long book, one heavily moralistic book, one easily enjoyable book, and one torturous-to-read book. Last year, we had American Pastoral(torturous), The Grapes of Wrath (moralistic) and Lonesome Dove (long and enjoyable). This year, we had The Gulag Archipelago (long and torturous), 1984 (moralistic) and The God of Small Things (enjoyable).

I think I'm on to something here. . .