Gap Year Reading - Part 1

I feel a little foolish taking a gap year, but then I know how to justify myself to myself. In my A2 year of college I was in the region of 70% sure that I wanted to go to university and excel in my field (English or Drama), about 20% sure I wanted to go to drama school and train as an actor, with 10% not sure if any of it was right at all. I could have applied in my A2 year, my mum says I should've. I can't change the past, however I can now know that what I want to do is go to university and pursue my loves: English and Drama, together as a joint degree. I was mostly sure when I should've been applying, but that 30% was enough of a risk for 3 years of my life and a debt which in all probability I could never repay.

In a way, this gap year is two-fold useful to me: for one, the way I did things means I had time to not make the wrong decision, and for the other, I wouldn't risk having done the right thing and always having wondered if I shouldn't have done something else. Taking time out to make decisions can be an important decision in itself, and if that means taking a whole year out, then so be it. Then again, a whole year is no trifling matter - in fact, it's a 19th of my entire life so far, and that slice of life being on the 'now' end of what I'm living makes it quite ominous, but I'll be damned if that means I'm going to waste a year. I am now set on my course, and this gap year I'm going to make all about giving myself a greg grounding for my study of English and Drama.

I said in my essay 'Reading and the Riptide' that reading books is like a Fibonacci spiral, each one connecting to many more, and each of those to many more again, exponentially expanding one's consciousness and understanding. I still stand by that assertion and by that logic I thought the best possible place to start my gap year preparation would be the local library. My plan is to get a hugely wide base of understanding to build up from, starting my experience horizontally as it were before building up vertically to more specific knowledge.



So, how does one achieve that? Well, the pertinent question has to be 'what is Drama and English?' Simply: literature. To paraphrase my personal statement, English is a reflection of every human thought that exists and is recorded from the real world, and Drama is a re-reflection from the page back into physical space. Drama, performance, theatre, they are all literature, and in my mind they are all about creating something which resembles reality in order to alter our perception of it. Therefore, if literature is a reflection of human reality, then the place to start is human reality.

My full reading list is 24 titles long, but I'm taking them out in blocks of 8 to break them down a little - here're the first 8 along with explanations, I'll write a summary when I finish them all.

Our world at the moment, and seemingly eternally is full of conflict, as someone who's politically involved that's something impossible to ignore, and the first 3 books on my reading list are an attempt to get to grips with at least some of that. The Torah, Bible and Qur'an are undeniably the cause of a lot of conflict, just for example, the struggle between Israel and Palestine, the recent terror attack against a Planned Parenthood health clinic in America and, of course, the horror of the so-called 'Islamic State'. Reading these books I intend to at least come to terms with some of the base conflicts occurring all over the world for no reason other than the book that people follow. As an atheist, I often find it distressing that violence occurs in the name of religion, and I want to understand what it is about these books that drives people to such depraved and desperate acts. Also, it is undeniable that those 3 books have had a huge impact on our global culture and mythology (home many times times have you seen TV/movie-heroes stand cruciform when they hit rock bottom?) and allegorical references to the details of these texts are littered through our literature - throughout my university career I will feel much better equipped to single-out such references having read the books. As of writing this article, I have already finished The Torah and Bible, and am 5/8ths through The Qur'an.

The next two on the list come as a sort of pair. I am aware that The God Delusion is perhaps a little infamous, but if so I would like to find out why. Though I am usually very relaxed and secular about my atheism, I would still like to be able to justify myself when I am challenged. If Dawkins' book is as controversial and militant as it is made out to be, I may find myself disagreeing with a lot of the points raised in the book, however it is a probably just as important to read the views you don't agree with as the ones you do, as then, as with the first three books, you understand where people are coming from and better equip your empathy. The formatting of The Case for God can't reasonably be assumed to be a coincidence, and as it was published just a few years after the The God Delusion I assume they're companions to each other, that the latter is in some way an answer to the former. The blurb would suggest there is discussion of the possibility of a god existing outside the dogma of an organised religion, which I would be very much interested in reading: it's always best to sample a balanced view.

Speaking of 'a balanced view', Why Can't They Get Along? sells itself as 'a conversation between a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew' which sounds like it will help me achieve what I was trying to achieve by reading the first three book.

The Historical Atlas of the British Isles is something I just chanced to spot on my way out of the library and since it's only a couple hundred pages and I'm studying English in England I might as well develop a broad base of understanding of the history of our island nation, as undoubtedly this affects our literature as well.

Finally, Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale isn't something I picked up from the library, it's actually a congratulation from my mum for my GCSE results. Doctor Who, as in Russell T Davies' show, had a huge impact on my world-view and morality as I was growing up, something I am by no means ashamed to admit, and I wholeheartedly aim to somehow create art in a similar vein to that. I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish this reading list in time for Christmas as December starts tomorrow, but still this was something of a treat book to time roughly in with Christmas and New Year - it's the one I most look forward to at any rate.

Along with the more factual tomes I'm reading literary (i.e. fictional) novels alongside at a rate of 1:1, alternating between factual and fictional literature to see how the truths of the former affect the latter. I started off the whole lot with Camus' L'Éntranger, to which I wrote a companion impressionistic short story which soon I will be uploading to this blog. Following that, between each of the subsequent book I'll be reading one of the Chronicles of Narnia, as they are truly fantastic books and a pretty nifty number of them to get me through to the end of the first part of my reading list. I've already read The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and enjoyed them just as much as I did reading them as a child and can't wait to get onto The Horse and his Boy once I finish The Qur'an.

In the meantime, Doctor Who reviews and maybe a series review of Marvel's Jessica Jones, and hopefully soon I'll get back to finishing the series of reviews for Gotham. I may have been sitting on the review of Suffragette, The Martian and Spectre too long to remember the details, but I'll try my best - and of course look forward to my review of the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, coming out later in December! I don't know how much this job is going to exhaust me, but I'll endeavour to keep creating content for my faithful readers.

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