A Dark, Dank, and Dreary Semester?

Check out the list of books I'll be reading this semester. I'd provide you with links... but there's so many of them that I just don't have the time. If you're curious: google it.

For the course "Modern Latin America" (the one for which I'm a teaching assistant):
Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America
A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture
Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala

For "The Socially Engaged Writer"
Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey from Lebanon
Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia
The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families
A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America
I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
The Granta Book of Reportage
Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora
Regarding the Pain of Others

For "Independent Study of Latin American Creative Nonfiction"
Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story
Salvador
Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America
From Grandmother to Granddaughter: Salvadoran Women's Stories
The Weight of All Things
The Massacre of El Mozote
Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope
Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala
I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala
The Rigoberta Menchu Controversy
Guatemala: Never Again!

For "Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop"
various chapters from my fellow classmates (some violent, some not)
various chapters from heroes of my fellow classmates (so we can imitate them)

My initial thoughts:
a) that's A LOT of books.
b) I like to read
c) that's a lot of books about violence and terror
d) who wants to read this many books about violence and terror?
e) If you contact me between now and April, send me happy thoughts. :)

Actually, though, I'm looking forward to this semester. All of the literature and coursework is focused on the role of the creative nonfiction writer--the writer who is half-memoirist, half-journalist--in the world, specifically Latin America. At least it's all concentrated in a particular area and not scattered into so many areas I'd have to compartmentalize myself. This is all very focused and interesting...

Good thing this is the spring semester--the sunlight during the day gets longer and the world gets warmer and hopeful from here on out... :)