3 ms·
> I had one course where the reading assignment for the first meeting (as in the first time we’d met as a class; we hadn’t even gone over the syllabus yet) was
by aestetix 5y ago
> I had one course where the reading assignment for the first meeting (as in the first time we’d met as a class; we hadn’t even gone over the syllabus yet) was an 30-page article, and the entire text of Thucydides (which to be clear, is 548 pages in the Landmark translation.
Aside from the Herculanean task of so much reading, Thucydides is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. The Landmark Translation took me almost 2 years to read, and I was not coming in blind, having already read Herodotus and many of the ancient greek plays. Reading that book in a month would be almost impossible. a week, I cannot imagine.
- UncleMeat 5y agoMy wife has a history PhD. For her quals, her reading list was over 300 books (okay, some of these were just scholarly articles but the bulk were books). To prep, she read about 2 a day with one day off per week for six months. I just laugh when I compare my quals in CS, which was two tests each covering one textbook and a discussion of about 10 papers.
- cge 5y agoAs a somewhat traditionalist physicist, and having grown up around university campuses, I love university libraries, and probably use them more than most scientists. It was a bit of a revelation to me when my partner, a historian, casually complained about the limits on simultaneously checked out items being a nuisance. Until that point, I had always assumed that the usual limits for scholars at university libraries, often over 100 books, were just there to prevent extreme abuse, not with the expectation that anyone would regularly reach them.
- UncleMeat 5y agoThis was my experience as well. Every single historian I know has piles and piles of books currently checked out from the library. And boy howdy are they unhappy when the books are recalled to be lent to somebody else.