<p>Is there a way to get around reading novels (not textbooks) in college. Im not saying that my plan is to not read but if I am really caught up in work and don't have enough time for this one book, is there a relatively easy way to get around it? or is the only real solution sparknotes</p>
<p>Sparknotes is probably your best bet…</p>
<p>I bet you probably could, like 10 pages a day right before you sleep.</p>
<p>^Not really. If the prof assigns 100 pgs on Tuesday to be completed Thursday, itd best to either suck it up and read or sparknote it (if available).</p>
<p>Really depends on the course. YMMV.</p>
<p>Or Wikipedia. It’s actually a much better source than people give it credit for if you’re smart about using it and make sure what you’re reading is properly cited at the bottom of the page.</p>
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<p>The nice thing about English is that the actual reading isn’t strenuous. 100 pages would take max 2 hours.</p>
<p>Unless it’s Chaucer. Not a quick read.</p>
<p>^Or Henry James.</p>
<p>…but sparknotes won’t get you a good grade? :/</p>
<p>The hell it won’t! I aced a ton of papers on Othello when I took College Comp II over the summer last year. And it was an honors class to boot. I read part of the play, realized why I never finished it years ago when I tried (it’s boring) and swore by Sparknotes and Wikipedia. Did the same thing during British Lit over some poems I wasn’t too clear on (curse you, TS Eliot!) but those A’s weren’t as frequent. But that’s because I didn’t realize until half-way through the semester that the professor seemed to equate the length of your essay to how much you understood/read/whatever the poem or short story and I adjusted accordingly.</p>
<p>^Then you had an awful professor. One would never be able to get away with a 10 page paper on a text I haven’t read at my college. Also, Othello is amazing.</p>
<p>Very infrequently, you can use the movie to avoid it. I watched the Crucible instead of reading the book (the movie actually took much longer to watch than the book did to read, surprisingly enough). It’s really rare that you can do that though, so I don’t recommend it.</p>
<p>If you don’t have time to do the work, then maybe you should take fewer classes.</p>
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<p>Oh I feel guilty on that front, we’ve been set two Henry James and I didn’t read either. The first one was Turn of the Screw which I should have read.
The second one was The Portrait of a Lady but my reading load was so intense in that semester, I had to sacrifice something!
At least I read Middlemarch to make up for it.</p>
<p>So sparknotes or wikipedia</p>
<p>@zychyrevns: …I don’t know where you got the impression that the paper was 10 pages. They were sectional papers done every certain milestone in the play. </p>
<p>And secondly, “One would never be able to get away with a 10 page paper on a text I haven’t read at my college.” YOU may not be able to do it, but plenty of people have, doesn’t meant the professor is “awful” if you can take a point and argue it using the context of the play and the history. I never read the play from start to finish, but I never said I didn’t read any of it. I read what was relevant to what I needed to know to get an A on the papers. </p>
<p>Lastly, reading Othello was awful. Watching it may be different, but I thought it was boring.</p>
<p>It really is different watching Othello. The version I saw at my local theatre was amazing. I will admit that Shakespeare is hard to get into.</p>
<p>I know someone who taught Shakespeare who encouraged his students to read the Sparknotes version before reading the actual play; that way, the students could engage the text without getting bogged down in the language.</p>
<p>Shakespeare wrote plays. Plays aren’t meant to be read. They are meant to be performed. If you can find a renactment of one of his plays on DVD, that’s actually more authentic than reading the play. </p>
<p>The Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare films I’ve seen (Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing) were pretty good. The Hamlet movie even did the entire text, so you wouldn’t be missing anything by just watching the movie.</p>
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<p>It’s a good story. I really liked the movie with Lawrence Fishburne as Othello and Kenneth Branagh as Iago (Christ I am such a fanboy). The new one with Julia Stiles was pretty bad though.</p>
<p>I wanted to see the one with Laurence F. but I couldnt find a copy on time. I saw a bit of it on YouTube and thought it looked really good.</p>
<p>Actually, I like Macbeth, Julius Ceasar, The Taming of the Shrew and some of his other stuff. I just didnt like Othello and I stull think Iago is crazy overrated as a villian.</p>
<p>lol sorry i thought the op was talking about recreational reading like lotr or harry potter.</p>
<p>^ not exactly</p>
<p>While textbooks and endless passages can be boring tedium, is it really so bad to just bunker down and read a good play/novel? If the worst that comes out of reading literature for your class is becoming a little more cultured than that isn’t so bad.</p>