I have been accepted to do an MA in Histroy at Manchester and am looking forward to it, however I've just got hold of a copy of an "illustrative" reading list for the 1st Semester's module (see below).

The first title alone is over 1,300 pages long so my question is: What percentage of a reading list would you actually be asked/expected to read? Don't get me wrong, i love reading and would be happy to read the lot, my fear is that i simply won't have time, especially given my other commitments.

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Norman Davies, Europe: A History
Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality
Mary Fulbrook, ed., National Histories and European History
Denis Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea
Anthony Pagden (ed), The Idea of Europe: from Antiquity to the European Union
K Wilson & J van der Dussen (eds), The History of the Idea of Europe Larry Wolff,
Inventing Eastern Europe
Stuart Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe

Nations and Nationalism
Gopal Balakrishnan (ed), Mapping the Nation
Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor
Geoff Eley & Ronald Grigor Suny (eds),Becoming National: A Reader Eric Hobsbawm,
Nations and Nationalism since 1780
Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France
Ernest Gellner,Nations and Nationalism
Elie Kedourie, Nationalism

Modernity and Modernization
Z Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 83-116
M Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity
B Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture
E Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France
H-U Wehler, The German Empire 1871-1918

Memory
Alon Confino, ‘Collective memory and cultural history: problems of method,’ American Historical Review 105 (1997), 1386-1403
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
M Halbwachs, On Collective Memory
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition
P Hutton, ‘Collective memory and collective mentalities: the Halbwachs-Ariès connection’, Historical Reflections 15 (1988), pp. 311-22
Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965
Pierre Nora (ed), Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, 3 vols
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History

The list is illustrative - so take no notice of it. You lecture handouts should be a lot more focused i.e., with specific chapters for reading.

you will get a better idea after your first session. You may find you never have to read the entire book, just dip in and out as the lectures progress. It may even depend upon the aspect you choose for your essays, I would use these lists as a starting point, get some of the books out of the uni library, or plonk yourself in the library, and have a look at the chapters to see which aspects they cover and make a list of these. Transfer these to index cards or something similar (make sure you reference each one so you know where the info is located!)and then you will then able to rearrange them as necessary into sources of material for specific topics as you need them, probably just as useful as trying to pick what to read from a long list of possible titles. :-)

Going from my experience of giving reading lists to my undergrads, I'd say they'd expect you to read maybe one or two from the top section (they look like background, big-sweep stuff) and then whatever interests you from the bottom three (sounding a bit Countdown there!). If it was me (and bear in mind I am pretty slapdash and always short on time) I'd read the articles and edited collections first from the bottom sections because you get a wider range of info for your time investment. They'd probably think you were going overboard if you'd read everything on that list.

Hi,

first off, wait for the lectures to start!

more often than not there will be a couple of key readings, and secondary readings assigned, what you are seeing now is for the entire course, when u look at it as lectures, you will understand its spread out in a much ore manageable may and will make much better sense.

Never feel you have to read all thats there on the list, likewise, never feel restricted to the list. creativity and originality in choice as well as depth is highly valued in marking essays and papers!

best!