Member: wordhound

Hi wordhound - nice of you to get in touch! Re that Bellow/Roth thing, I admit to never having read any Bellow; what would you recommend as a starting point? It's probably time I tried something. As far as Roth goes, I have read Pastoral and it put me off trying any others. I don't know why, exactly, I just couldn't engage with it at all and didn't care a jot about the characters. I'm more than willing to accept, though, that the fault was probably mine rather than Roth's - I suspect I always have to be in the right mood for any given book and for some reason I just wasn't for that one!

You seem to be having the same thoughts about OU as I did before I started. With the literature courses more than any there is a heck of a lot to read and they're not always things you want to read. I think the most 'book-heavy' one I did included soemthing like 15-20 novels, each of which had to be read at least twice if not more, plus all the other reading of excerpts, short works and text books, so it really does mean saying goodbye to most of your 'normal' reading for 10 months but the gains are enormous. I started the courses at an ideal time (for me) when I had pretty much exhausted all the stuff I could get hold of in local libraries and my own collections but din't really know where I wanted to go from there. I felt a bit intimidated by many of the classics and felt I wasn't getting as much out of them as I should so I was glad to have the oportunity of some guidance through many of those. I do enjoy rereading too, so I didn;t have a problem with looking from a different angle at books I have read before. But I must say I found the courses thoroughly enjoyable - the language ones rather less so than the literature (because they really weren;t as well written and some of the text books remain in my memory as some of the most boring works I have ever read). If I was doing the BA again I think I would go purely for literature next time.

I did find many books that I either hadn't read or hadn't fully understood, which have since become real favourites - plus a few that still wake me screaming at night(!) but at least now I know what was good or bad about them and WHY I liked or disliked them. I found the whole thing of studying books rather than just reading them a real joy and I learnt a lot more about my own tastes and where to find the 'right' books for me. I still often wonder about going back to do some more OU and might go on to the MA sometime, although I'm not too keen on a lot of the set works for that one. The whole OU thing was immense fun though. And that's not to ignore the huge fun of getting that certificate at the end of it all. I do hope you decide to go ahead, I think you'll have a wonderful time. The social side can be as much or as little as you wish - tutorials are useful but not compulsory - and in my day, a couple of the courses I did had summer schools which were fantastic. I'm not sure if that is still the case, I understand many of the residential bits have been cut back on lately to save expense.

There is an OU group here - http://www.librarything.com/groups/openu... - where you can chat to other students past and present if you'd like some more comments about the courses (no surprise that quite a few of the people on LT have done or are doing the lit ones!) Good luck!

posted by Booksloth at 7:35 am (EST) on Sep 3, 2009