I enrolled for my course for the third year yesterday. I will be starting on Tuesday with a lecture at 10, and then I am on Wednesday morning, and er...that's it.
My course gets very thin in terms of contact time in the third year; I will end up being in lectures and seminars for six hours per week in the autumn and spring terms.

I got my course books through Amazon yesterday morning. For my unit on the twentieth century British novel I will be reading through Howard's End, Mrs Dalloway, Voyage in the Dark, The End of the Affair, The Unicorn, The Driver's Seat, Brick Lane and Lighthousekeeping. I know, before you ask, that the final two were written in this century!
I am looking forward to getting started. At the moment I am also reading War and Peace. It's a massive novel, and I just felt that I wanted to actually read it, rather than remain terrified of the fact that it's sort of become a shorthand for lengthy 'classic' novels. So far it's a really fascinating read, dealing with a period of history that I know next to nothing about (the Napoleonic wars and the Russian state in the early nineteenth century).

I have been thinking this morning about my course, and my attitude towards it. It's difficult sometimes not to lose some of your passion for reading when the process becomes so formalised by your studies. I haven't read much over the summer, but what I have read has been excellent; in July I read Philip Yancey's What's so amazing about Grace? which changed my thinking and the way I live our my faith, and in August Brother Yun's incredible testimony The Heavenly Man. I knew little about the Chinese church beforehand, certainly I knew nothing in detail. The book is certainly worth reading for anyone as a testimony to the power of God, not just in brother Yun's life, but in the lives of the members of the Chinese Church as a whole, and all our lives as members of the body of Christ (1Corinthians 12). It's a fantastic book, and praise God for the amazing things He has done in China through Brother Yun and so many other faithful followers of Christ there; the accounts of the persecutions faced by the Christians at the hands of the Communist state are astonishing, unbelievably stark and terrifying, but ultimately witness to the triumph of Jesus, who has won the battle and saved all of us from our sins.