I had multiple goals in mind when starting this project. First, I wanted to try and work through my infinite TBR of both fiction and nonfiction since I read a little bit of everything. Second, I wanted to more equally devote my reading to nonfiction books, which I had sorely neglected in recent years. I made a list of an equal amount of fiction and nonfiction books that I had recently purchased/been gifted over the holidays and then cut out the titles into strips of paper. I put all the strips in a jar and randomly selected a fiction and nonfiction title to tandem read. A third goal I had was that I wanted to get back into reading and analysis reminiscent of my academia days to keep my brain active because in recent months, I had begun to feel not like I was “getting dumber,” but I felt I wasn’t thinking with the same acuity nor reading with the same analytical mind as I used to, due to increased screen time on my phone and constantly consuming short-form content online that was doing its job of capturing and holding my attention. I pondered what I could do to foster that thinking and analysis and settled on writing something as an honorable mention goal is to get back into writing in general, as I can’t remember the last time I wrote anything that required the thinking and analysis I was trying to reinvigorate. 

In short, I’m doing this for the love of the game (and my brain) and to share my findings with anyone who cares to read them. 

The next step was to figure out what to write about two books in different genres that had the smallest chance of being even remotely related topic-wise. Then I remembered I had to do something similar in a Women in Literature course I took in college. It was one of the favorite papers I had written where we had to compare a book of our choice to at least one of the books we had read throughout the course. I chose to compare the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehranand the YA novel Symptoms of Being Human. By the end, it also became the paper I was most proud of out of any of the papers I had written in college, especially considering the feedback I received from the graduate assistant who taught the course. At the time, I was considering pursuing a PhD and since she was in FSU’s PhD program and working on her dissertation, she was the perfect person for me to talk to, and she would stay after class with me to let me pick her brain about what pursuing a PhD looked like. I greatly appreciated her taking the time to do that when she didn’t have to and she even sent me a copy of her abstract to get an idea of the type of writing a dissertation required. (Ashley Christensen if you ever see/read this, thank you!) I valued her thoughts and opinions and to receive the positive feedback she gave me was so academically validating. I think I still have a screenshot somewhere of her feedback in Canvas and I know I still have the paper itself for preservation. 

At first, I was just going to do a simple compare and contrast between my fiction and nonfiction choices. In fact, this project was first going to be titled Commonalities and Differentiations. I realized, though, that the differences would be almost too easy to write about, and too obvious to add any real depth to the analysis I was trying to achieve. It would be harder, and for me more fun, to focus on what the two books would have in common, despite the fact they were in different genres and about different topics. I bought two notebooks for jotting notes, quotes, or anything else I felt could play a part in the eventual writing piece that followed and to also force me to engage even more with what I was reading. The more I finalized my thoughts on this project, the more I grew excited and motivated to achieve the goals I set out for myself. 

And thus, I drew my first two slips of paper.