reading update

I'm at 40 books read, so far. It's not nearly enough, but I'm glad, nonetheless, to finally be talking in 1/4s or 1/3s of my reading list complete! (I'm trying to knock the list numbers down from 200ish books to a more reasonable 120 or so (the lowest anyone's ever done here is 107.)...of course, I'm not sure my committee will go for that, but it's worth a shot.)

Really, I'm starting to figure out how to be a smarter reader: when to skim, when to read every word, what books I should also read a few critical articles about. I think it took until about book 25 to come to this place. I had to get my feet wet in what was out there as far as place/environmental writing before I was able to realize when arguments are redundant or don't exactly relate to what I'm doing.

Our comps process is two-part: 1st a 60-ish page written exam over four questions that the student and committee come up with. The second part's an oral exam over everything. The good news is that I have two questions written (& they've gotten the a-okay from my chair.) Here are my attempts at questions:

1. (How) did the environmental writing movement evolve out of the nature writing genre? (The implication: how might we take a longer view of history?)
2.In recent years, there seems to have been a turn towards the lyric essay as a nonfiction mode for writing about places of conflict. Discuss the apparent efficacy of the lyric in the narrator's role as regional witness.
3. Something to do with wilderness/frontier
4. Something to do with 19th Century British colonialism (maybe as related to fantasy writing.)

And, for my geeky writer/reader friends who read this blog (you know who you are), here's my booklist. Any big omissions or things I should definitely NOT read? Any suggestions for my questions?