Studying in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program has been an amazing experience, because of the workshops during residency, the one-on-one exchanges with my term instructor outside the residencies, and the near-constant reading of and learning from books. One of the program's objectives is to make each student read and analyze a total of one hundred books of their choice, preferably relevant to their project, so my goal was to read at least fifty books for the program during my first year. (I actually achieved that goal early but I put the extra books I read on my reading list for Term 3. I don't count books unrelated to my creative writing, for instance biographies, but we are allowed to read outside our genre, so I do have some poetry and nonfiction books on my Bennington reading list.)
Because I started the program in January, Term 1 for me was the shorter winter term that runs from January to May, so my goal there was to read twenty books, and Term 2 was the longer summer/fall term that runs from June to December with a break in July, so my goal was to read thirty books during Term 2.
Here are my fifty books of Terms 1 and 2 in pictures:
Term 1 (twenty books)
Term 2
First Half (fifteen books)
Second Half (fifteen books)
It is hard to pick favorites, but some books that stood out include: A Thousand Acres, Horse, The English Patient, Nobody's Fool, Bluets, Preston Falls, A Summons to Memphis, The Handmaid's Tale, Revolutionary Road, House of Sand and Fog, The Magician, Giovanni's Room, Red Rover, Housekeeping, Jernigan, Biography of X, Bel Canto, Transit of Venus, Ordinary People, My Brilliant Friend and Lost in the City.
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