Keocmb said:
I'm an English major. I read a novel (yes. NOVEL) a week and write, on average, 5 papers a week.
I feel your pain.
English major here as well. Last year I was taking "The Novel" alongside "American Lit One." Two novels a week, or at least 8 or 9 short stories and a novel every week.
So, some of my fun pairings were
Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby with Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom with Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway
A lot of stories by Flannery O'Connor with Nabokov's
Pale Fire
Kerouac's
On the Road with Garcia Marquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude
I did enjoy all of these books, though. (Still think we should have read Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Novel).
There was much other chaotic reading funness, plus all of my other classes. This semester I have three lit classes and a history class (where we're not using a textbook, but primary sources and novels instead... may as well be a lit course).
The thing is with English papers, they tend to just come together for me. I haven't gotten less than an A on one since Freshman year. Papers for other classes (like Psych, or Communications, or HIstory) take a lot more preparation. But I did a Psychoanalytic paper on "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" in about 2 hours (with a few hours of research the night before), and got a 96. Had I tried that in any other class, it wouldn't have been more than a B.
I pity anyone who's writing papers that are not lit papers. Lit papers, though you do of course have to support your claims, are still more subjective and you have a bit more freedom. You have my pity.