My Undergrad in Textbooks (the summer semester to my final (5th) year)

Top: books I used in Russia
Bottom: book I bought in Russia

The Russian department at MUN has a program which runs every other year (well, when I was there it did) in which we could go to St. Petersburg, Russia in the summer and earn course credits at the same time. Out of people who signed up for the summer courses there were only 6 people who signed up for actually going overseas and doing stuff there. Our instructor (from MUN) gave us some reading to do beforehand and it was from the book on the top right (St. Petersburg by Arthur L. George). That book was not easy to obtain as it was no longer published in North America but somehow one of they guys on the trip managed to find a copy in Dom Knigi. I had to get the book online through the rare and used collection and luckily it arrived before the postal strike. I hated how I had to summarize the book as one of my assignments but I did learn a lot of interesting things about Russian history centered around St. Petersburg (Peter the Great liked Dutch things and shipbuilding, the city was named after St. Peter). The top left book was the workbook used for the Russian language classes given to us for free (though I'm sure it was included in the cost of the course). Not only it teaches grammar and vocab but if I purchased the disk it might have helped me with the pronunciation and intonation sections. The book with the robot on it is meant for beginners in Russian but the reason I got it was of the pictures explaining things as well as for practice and review.

film text books and sociology
course textbook

My fifth year I didn't spend too much on textbooks as each semester I had three courses. The fall semester I took a course in Russian film, historical linguistics, and anthropology-sociology course on media and mass communication. I have never taken a film course before and a lot of the work in that course, besides discussing the films themselves, involved discussing elements of film like mise-en-scene and the significance of long takes hence the David Bordwell book on film. Film analysis isn't really my cup of tea but after taking that course almost every film I see I seem to do analyses of my own (if anyone sees the movie Limitless, take note of how the lighting changes when Bradley Cooper is on the drug and when he is not). Historical lingustics (the continuation of the 3rd year course now at the 4th year level) reused the same red textbook at times but most of the material was from photocopies and notes the instructor made many years ago. The fall semester was also my introduction to the world of sociology courses (even though I just took the one). The reason I took that course was out of curiosity as well as having something to balance out my schedule (films for my Russian film course were on Fridays from 3-5, the sociology course was on Mondays and Wednesdays around the same time). Not sure how much I've read of the book (but reading it helped in understanding class discussions) but it opened me up to how mass media works.

English Grammar and phonetics textbooks

The winter semester I took a course in phonetics, phonology, and English grammar. Phonology mostly involved signing out books from put on reserve in the library as the instructor provided sheets for us to print off. The English textbook has an interesting cover (it's orange) but I didn't like the book that much (didn't read much of it either). The book was published in 1999 and mentions English as "on its way to becoming the official language of the European Union" and MS-DOS in one of its examples ("The new MS-DOS is incredibly fast (predicative adjective)"). Even though standard English hasn't changed much at least make a revised edition of the book that uses examples that are more attuned to modern times and a younger generation. The phonetics textbook is a great one that I'll treasure. The reason I like this textbook is it gives instructions on how to make the sounds not found in English as well as how human speech is produced.

That's all for my textbooks and it has been quite the journey. At least I made it out alive.