How To Buy Time In Lit Class

If my literature teacher finds this post, I'm in so much trouble.

Seriously, have you ever heard of this?

I take English A Literature HL. What that means is I have to read quite a few essays, poems, novels, and plays. A bunch of these, I have literally never heard of (before I got my list of works, I had absolutely no idea who JM Coetzee or Saul Bellow were). Others are just hard to find. I mean, it's really easy to get yourself a copy of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, especially living in India, and ditto to Shakespeare's Hamlet, but where the heck do you get Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children without trawling through Flipkart? It's a German play set during a European war like four centuries ago, what are the chances of it being in your local JustBooks?


Also, some of these are...dull. (I don't want to put you off, but you are incredibly likely to be forced to read at least one very boring text you struggle to finish during IB, whether you take Literature or Language and Literature)

Basically, sometimes class discussion and analysis of a text starts before you actually read it, whether that's because you haven't gotten a copy or it's slow to the point of being soporific or you have more pressing assignments. I get it. I do. You're going to have to eventually read it (I can say with the authority of experience that reading the book tends to majorly improve your scores) but here are some ways you can buy time to do so.


SECRET #1: Google Zindabad

You're gonna have to do the research. Google the text. Stuff like Wikipedia and Sparknotes will get you through several classes while you read the book. Get a basic understanding of the plot - even if sometimes you feel as if there is none - and some of the main characters.

Don't go into class with the vague knowledge that The Namesake is about a dude named after a Russian author. Go in knowing that it's set in the Indian diaspora in New England, spanning several decades and following the story of Gogol Ganguli, a whiny ABCD kid traumatised by the fact that his parents named him after depressed Russian author Nikolai Gogol. (Can you tell I'm not a fan of the book?)

SECRET #2: Pay Attention in Class

What, you thought I'd give you an easy way to sleep in class? Pay attention, kid, and you'll pull through IB.
This one's fairly self-explanatory. Pay attention. You'll learn stuff. It'll help you understand what on earth is going on when you do read the text.

SECRET #3: Sound Intelligent

I mean, I'm sure you're smart. But when I say "sound intelligent", I'm talking about asking smart questions in class. Stuff like "Could you give an example of the use of irony?" or "Does <character name> exemplify <philosophy that the author subscribed to>?" instead of "Who is this random character who came in during chapter 5?"

SECRET #4: Know Literary Terminology

You don't really need to know obscure literary terms like "lipogram" (which, by the way, is kind of random), but make sure you understand the difference between metaphors and similes, and know stuff like irony, personification, allusions, euphemisms, and hyperbole. This helps you with #3, sounding intelligent.

And finally, once you've bought your time, there's one more thing to do: read the text. To do this, keep one thing in mind-

SECRET #5: Persevere

Okay, so you finally access a copy of the work, and you don't have any immediate assignments, and you start to read...
...and it's boring.
Not every literature text is interesting. And with all the work you have, you might want to just relax and coast off your Sparknotes.
Don't. Give. Up.
My classmates were surprised when I read one of our texts in about an hour because, although it was barely over a hundred pages, there was so little plot that they had struggled for a few weeks.
Do you really want to spend weeks on a text when you can read it in a few hours? I didn't much like that text either, but I had no intention of prolonging that boredom. I refused to get up until I finished, and I read the book faster than anyone else.

My point? Persevere. Push through unwillingness or boredom when you read a text. You'll save yourself time, and you'll get it done with. It's a weight off your shoulders.


Good luck!