Yah, you posted some really good stuff. Now I want to read Youth and now I feel like a copycat. This is one of the many problems of having an English major friends, problems that multiply when you put two English major friends together. Going back to Youth, I feel pretty boring sometimes, especially when the weekend rolls around and I realize I neglected to plan anything "fun" to do. For example, it's seven o-clock on a Friday night and I am typing this blog post while laying in my bed in pajamas. After this I think I am going to take a nap. I don't feel bad about this. These things give me pleasure, but perhaps, like T.S. Elliot, I am dull. Oh well. (this post is really going to be a hodgepodge of things I have been thinking about. I'll briefly outline what's going to be in it: English major friends, what I'm learning as opposed to what you are learning, asking questions and I need a book to read).

Problems with having English Major friends:
1) You realize how utterly dismal your grammar is and your friends are more than willing to point that out. They try and elucidate you by stating confusing example sentences that involve you picking your nose and your picking your nose. Either way someone is picking their nose, right?
2) You just want to furtively read everything they are reading and pretend you thought about reading that great book all on your own.
3) That's all. Mostly there are only benefits to have smart-as-a-whip English friends.

What I am learning as opposed to what you are learning:
Being in limbo between a history and Econ major made me assess what I would be learning in each type of major. It's kinda weird to me that in both majors I would definitely be learning a lot, but people give so much more credit to what I would be learning in Econ as opposed to History. I think it's because what I learn in Econ is pretty quantifiable. It's equations and models and numbers and effect of a price increase and how much money I'm making, etc. while what I'm learning in history just seems like this ambiguous nebulous that involves dates, people and lots of reading. It's hard to really pinpoint bundles of knowledge that I'm learning in history and my progress from step a to step b, while in Econ, I can tell you one day I learned about costs and the next day I learned about revenue and after that I'm going to learn about profits and then some consulting firm is going to snatch me up and hire me. So I think people tend to discredit fields of study that seem really vague to them because they can't decompose them so easily. They can't tell you exactly what is hard about history, so it's easy. Or if they find something hard about history, like writing a paper, they think writing a paper is the most useless thing in the world.
I guess this passage is starting to become my soapbox for people discrediting liberal arts and history majors. I can think of a lot of terms and equations that I could hurl at you and you wouldn't know what I'm talking about but you could look at a poem and understand so much more than I ever would. It's like you can look into this whole other literary world that I am just blind to. Sometimes I think econ majors can't see what liberal art majors see and so they unfairly give liberal art majors labels.
The other thing is, do you have any goods book I could read? I was going to read Middlemarch, but I'm in the mood for a more modern book. Written within the last one hundred years would be good.