Episode 323: Yo Hablo Español

Like, seriously. I went through an entire unit of my online Spanish course. It is terribly repetitive after a while, but it does drum the simplest of grammatical structures and vocabulary into my head. I'm getting a bit tired of the software not recognising my pronunciation though, so I've started turning off the speech recognition component, which basically lets me skip through all the speaking bits of the course. See, I'm a little obsessed with getting 100% on each exercise, so this saves me the trouble of having to redo an exercise just because the software judged some mysterious quality to be absent from my voice! I'm planning to keep up this pace, one unit per day. At this rate, I'll definitely be able to finish both the Spanish and Italian courses before they expire. I also found time today to finish reading that book of anecdotes. I must say that I'm a bit disappointed by the lack of contemporary writers. What about Julian Barnes? A. S. Byatt? Kazuo Ishiguro? Edmund White? I'm a bit of a snob, so I really don't consider the inclusion of J. K. Rowling to constitute much in the way of contemporary literature, and find it a particularly stinging slap in the face of anyone who reads books that aren't meant to be turned into movies that the editor chose to end his collection of anecdotes with one concerning Rowling. I write this as someone who has never read any of her books, and is actually proud to say so. I will watch the films, but I refuse to read the books. Not out of what I personally consider would be a misguided sense of rectitude, but simply because I don't think they're worth reading. There, I've said it. I dare anyone to contradict me.