Tag / Book Review

by Sixer

Lang Wae Gangged

I dinna ken it a’, but I kenned enouch to gang on with.

I think that would make a pretty tombstone for most people, “I didn’t understand everything, but I understood enough to get along.” I read George MacDonald’s Malcolm over my winter break (and skimmed through the wretched sequel), and then of course had to write poems and think in meter for the next 24 hours because reading such lovely prosery, and thinking about the ebb and flow of words – which is unavoidable when most of the dialogue is in Scots – does put my mind in a fidget. Of course, all the beautiful nature was also a bit intoxicating. It has been an unbroken silence of gray here for the past few days, with only a breath of muted rain late one evening. The same day on repeat.

I’m conflicted about MacDonald (at least his fiction. I love his allegories), but I am not conflicted about loving Malcolm. The first line stole my heart. Miss Horn and her vociferous thanksgiving over being made with no feelings! She is naturally my favorite character, followed by the ocean, the sky, and then Duncan. But of course the book is not about her, it’s about somebody else. I don’t dislike Malcolm (only vicariously, in the sequel, but this Malcom can’t be blamed for that). Malcolm is fine when you’re in the book, but when you’re out of it he can’t come with you. He is like faerie gold that dissapears in the morning, or like that first snowflake that you carefully carry home only to find it’s already melted once you’ve arrived. The ocean and the sky are more real than he is, I can dream of going to find them. But there never was and never will be a Malcolm in this world. I like the narrator better, because I can argue with him. I dearly love to argue, and the narrator is so opinionated I’m sure he would oblige me. I feel that we would get along, whereas Malcolm and Graham would find me a poor companion: Too impatient to watch the dawn for hours. Or to sit and work out the Eculid in the original Greek. To prosaic to find resolution in an abstraction.

I love the absurdity of the uneveness of the past. Our minds even things out so much, they’re always supprised to find dips and peaks in reality. We want to find things better or worse and so do, when often they are only rearranged. We think about the oppurtuinty for education now, and imagine there was little of it available before. But sometimes reading old books it seems that it’s always been an uneven mixed bag. Here’s a fishing village with a school master who knows greek and latin (duh. Doesn’t every college educated man?), so naturally anyone with a desire to learn a little more than the basics will, between catching herring and mending nets, pick up those languages too. Oh, but let us not talk about education. The word is so dual in my mouth it makes my head swim, and so hard and cold it makes my teeth ache.

And let’s not talk about poetics either. The way colors can be all cast up together in a paragraph, bunched up tightly to fit, to describe a single night sky. Certainly, lets not talk about the soul-poetic, for that would leave me out of my depth. I’m afraid I have a hard time believing in it, and must go on faith that it does exist in some people. It’s much easier to talk about a book’s internal inconsistencies than about it ecstasies, just like I suppose it’s easier to point out someone is wearing mismatched socks than to put into words the effect of their outfit on the whole.

I think that’s the genius of the poetic mind. They can take the soul of a thing and put it in flat, ink-printed (only, I read it on my ipad) words, where it’s preserved until it enters someone’s brain and is there rehydrated, in a sense. I suppose that means there must be some extra soul in the reader for the soul of the original to come out right. A sunset is after all only a sunset. But a moment is a thing with history and context and feeling and meaning, and the poet has to put the one in the other, and then trust the reader is able to unpack and assemble it.

by Sixer

Mists and Memories

What does hope mean to you? I ask this question after re-reading the Mistborn trilogy. Well, I say “read” but I mostly skimmed the first book. Skipping swaths of dialogue, whole chapters, jumping from paragraph to paragraph through (painfully violent) fight scenes. It was the book closest to me, that’s why I had picked it up. And it was interesting after all, so I kept at it. But, honestly, I wasn’t really paying attention until I started the second book.

I don’t think I have ever been so amazed at my ability to forget.

Now might be a good time to mention that there are going to be major spoilers, so if you are the kind of person who enjoys how the story unfolds you ought to stop reading here (and, really, Sanderson’s story is so well crafted from beginning to end that it’s a shame to not try to solve the mystery yourself as you read it. There are places that made me stop and wonder, “did he retroactively make that decision?” What an intricate attention to seemingly decorative but ultimately plot-vital detail).

 

But I digress. Memory. I had forgotten so much. The ONLY thing I remembered of the second book was . . . . well, actually, nothing. Not one thing. Marsh – I distinctly had the impression that he sacrificed himself in book one. So I was completely puzzled when he, you know, was still alive at the end of that book. I remember really liking him, and yet I had managed to block out two books worth of his actions. And the kandra. I had forgotten literally everything about them. I mean, I knew what they could do, but I didn’t remember anything else. The Kolosses too, it didn’t even occur to me to ask how they were made when they were introduced in book two. I knew Vin and Elend would gain control of them and be uncomfortable about it . . . . but I had (probably on purpose, because it really is too wretched to fully realize) forgotten how they were made. And the siege – you know, the thing that takes up two-thirds of the third book? – completely new to me. I remembered who the final hero of the ages was, but nothing about the final battle. I had even somehow managed to be surprised when it became obvious what Ruin was looking for and why. In fact, when you look at the hundreds of things that happen in the last two books, the only four that I really remembered was the infallibility of metal, the earring, the purpose behind the mists (only, for some reason I thought they had affected Elend? And that the discovery of the purpose had been almost immediate?), and Elend and Vin crashing a ball. That last one I remember so vividly I assumed it happened a lot. And, because I didn’t remember anything about Elend being king (much less emperor), I thought it happened in book 2.

All of these things point to only one explanation: I must have stayed up late reading these books, and I must have, in my desire to Find Out What Happened Next, skimmed pretty badly. I didn’t think I did that (at such scale) with unknown books but how else do you account for such a vast lack of recollection?

Of course, there is another theory too, and that is that I was dissatisfied with the ending and so forgot everything else in disgust. Well, yes, I have been known to do such things for far less provocation. For one thing, the book’s concept of godhood is bizarre – which is actually my main point in writing this. But, probably more to the heart, it killed off its main couple at the end. Tragic.

Reading it this second time, braced as it were for the inevitable (ha! I did remember that much!), their deaths didn’t bother me. Their world was, after all dying, and if they didn’t die in saving the world they would have died, and everyone one else with them, in loosing it. And also, they knew they had won when they died, which is quite a lot, and the whole second and third books actually, when you look at them together, had been specifically cultivating them to feel their lives were not their own to live anyway. So that’s all good then. Not that I approve of people killing off their characters willy-nilly, but I’ll concede that these deaths made sense both for realism and the narrative.

 

And, looking at it as a chance to sandbox – and after all, what else is fiction really for? –  the god thing is fascinating. Actually, it was book two when it became fascinating, book two and its cult of the Survivor. And that, ultimately, is what made me keep reading, to see what faith would mean in this universe. Because, for a depressingly significant percentage of books two and three, the only hope offered is the hope of surviving. That’s it. The characters’ goal was literally “everyone not dying.” Not in the sense of saving everyone, but in the sense of at least saving someone. And it made me think, almost instantly, of something I’d read in a book recently. The author said that, when you looked at what some people believed, all it boiled down to really was surviving. They were only living for life – success, health, happiness, contentment. Even when talking in general of people focused on love and service, even just talking about regular people, so many of us on this planet live our lives as if this is all there is. We’re just trying to get by, as the saying goes. And you can really see, pretty quickly, how this kind of thinking can corrupt even the most well-intentioned of people. There is no pay-off for being altruistic, especially if the world is ending. It is what causes Vin to overthrow Elend’s carefully crafted dreams of the perfect legal system, and what leads Elend to lay siege on a more or less innocent city. Because when your only hope is to survive, when survival itself becomes your goal, you no longer have the option of failure. The option of being the better person, of turning the check, of dying for your principles. Death is the only evil, and you must stave it off at all costs to win.

In this sense, it is perfectly fitting that when Elend finally realized his hope is not in survival but in renewal – in new life – he was able to choose the right way instead of the necessary way. And too, when Vin fully understood that Ruin was afraid, and that his fear indicated he could be, not just survived, but defeated, she took her life-risking gamble. And won, by loosing. In effect, she chose too die, chose to not survive, so that the earth could be a place of life and not death.

 That still seems a bit depressing, really. Sweet, but still . . . . very, very final. But then that is the other oddity that bugged me. The other side of the “just survive” mantra: the finality of death. Not one of the religions mentioned in the trilogy, and there were a few, were known for their afterlives. For a hope that existed beyond death. There was no Hell, no Heaven. No, what, nirvana? This just seems statistically unlikely. Oh sure, someone raised the possibility of ghosts at some point, so certainly there must have been superstitions about the soul, but the only “ghosts” we Readers see are phonys or illusions. This rather puts a damper on the whole dying thing. For all the deaths that occur throughout the books, the only person who we see struggling with the Death of the Soul question actually becomes an atheist because of it.

And yet, despite this perfectly finite notion of the soul that is built up in all three books, the trilogy ends with a note from the new god stating that Vin and Elend are perfectly happy where they are, and, hey, that guy who died in book one says “good job.” So . . . . there apparently is an afterlife after all? But, and I’m going off on a particularly unstable limb here, I suspect it’s not one run by the same forces that created the world. It’s not the kind of thing Ruin could have sanctioned (being eternal preservation, as it were) nor, if it was under Preservation’s power, would there have been much of a point in saving the world. If this afterlife were Preservation’s domain, than he should have let Ruin have the world and taken all the souls to said “better place.”

But even more fundamentally, Ruin and Preservation were part of the world – not just active gods, but physically integrated as well –  and so how could they have made a place separate from it? No, there must be some other power who controls this place, a place none of the other religions mentioned because its existence was beyond the scope, the jurisdiction, of the world’s creators. Perhaps a force higher than Preservation and Ruin, one with different goals and a different nature. This would be an exciting story to read! After all, we still do not know if Preservation and Ruin were originally one. Nor do we know who (or how) they had previously possessed (that they were possessing other people is obvious in that, when they “died” they left behind human corpses). I can see these two being attributes of a greater power, shaved off and set loose. Evolving over time and association – with each other and with their own creation – personalities and desires distinct from their original abstract natures. How does this change the way we view their war? The suffering of their people?

 

But going back to hope: I’m in the middle of writing another post, about what actually decides me on a book, and it’s obvious when discussing Sanderson what is most precious to me is his complete inability to accept despair. Feel it, see, it, taste it: yes. But accept it? Never. Even if his world isn’t set up in a way that seems to encourage hope, humility, or sacrifice, his characters embody it anyway. This is most beautifully (and dramatically) illustrated in the bridge runner portions of his The Way of Kings novel, but you can clearly see it here too. After all, isn’t his idea of trust, freely given, as the best basis for all relationships, and therefore societies, defiantly reliant on hope? Of expecting, even assuming, the best out of people even if people don’t always show you their best? It’s not surprising that I ate Mistborn up the first time I read it, or that I found it still engaging all these years later. Hope is a story I will never tire of hearing.

 

 

by Sixer

All the Dark We Cannot Hide

I was speaking with someone at church before Christmas about reading, admitting that I hardly ever read non-fiction, and she recommended a few books for me. Book recommendations are right up there with blind dates in my opinion – if you refuse them you imply you don’t trust the recommender, but accept and you have all the anticipation of absolutely hating it, and the awkwardness of letting the recommender know your opinion of their tastes. I had just finished Elinor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine, based on a coworker’s glowing review (after getting only halfway through that potato-peel society book, suggested to me by another co-worker), so I was a bit wary of yet another promise of “it’s just delightful.” But this colleague said the two things that make any recommendation irresistible: one, that the book used words beautifully, to the extant you would want to go back and read certain passages over again; and two, that there were places in the book that were cruder than she would wish but – it was grudgingly admitted – they made sense in context. Strangely it’s the latter comment that means the most. It gives me the freedom to come back and say “it ended up being too crude for me,” if I just can’t get through it. It gives me permission to be a prude, when normally that’s something I have to hide or make excuses for. It also means that there will be no nasty surprises. There may be nasty things, but at least they won’t be a surprise. Yes. I like my fiction with twists, not trapdoors.

So I put a hold on All the Light You cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, and waited. It finally came in just before new years, but I wasn’t able to pick it up until Saturday morning. And then I had bread to bake, and laundry to do, and all in all I didn’t get it started until after 3. You can probably guessed what happened next. Yes, Reader, I finished it. And, because this is one of the things I want to grow in, I’m writing up a little impression for it. Not a review, because I’m bad at those, but a “thoughts and take aways.”

And of course, the first thought is that it was beautifully written. The words painted a vivid picture, a real 3-D world that called for us to step into it. Now I want to go to France and tour Saint Malo. I want to go through the exhibits in Paris’ muesem. To breath the salty air of the one and eat the food of the other. Even though one of the characters – the one who, really, shows us the most – is blind, the book has a deep impression of color. Bright, bold, subtle, everyday, extravagant colors. Perhaps the continual use of texture in descriptions gives the colors something to hold onto, like sauce on ridged pasta. But it’s not just the colors, the format of the book also was masterful. The book is divided into time periods instead of chapters – some lasting weeks, some merely lasting days. Inside each period the narrators trade back and forth, like a tide, in short views, sometimes no longer than a half page. Just as the narrators’ experiences weave back and forth, so do the time periods: going forward almost to the end, then back to the beginning, skipping ahead a month, falling back a week; until finally narrators and tenses meet. The format – meaning the words and construction – of this book is wonderful. It sometimes feels like there are so many stories to be told, we’re all rushing to get them down on paper as fast as possible and don’t have time to pretty them up. This slow, intentional building of a story shines as a hopeful gem of craftsmanship.

Which is a contrast with its content. Because All the Light you Cannot See is about the second world war. The beginning, the middle, the end. The deceptions, the disruptions, the deaths. So many kinds of death. It’s about loss and living. About denial and realization; knowledge and learning; drive and disillusionment. This book didn’t leave me feeling awful to be a human, it left me feeling awful because I am human. No flaw in our nature went unexposed. Greed? Cowardice? Complacency? All are displayed by the author’s pen – Doerr doesn’t have to make them up, only puts down what is there. There is no shadow large enough to hide the evil that humans are capable of. And, honestly, the book doesn’t leave one with a hopeful, humanistic “but we can overcome our nature” kind of feeling. Just as the beauty shown was everyday, so was the grossest misuse of power, love, intelligence. The impression I’m left with is “the only beauty we have in us as human beings is brought forth in delighting in the beauty of nature – the beauty of this wonderful, complicated, world.” This isn’t something the book ever says, you understand, it is only the conclusion I’ve reached after reading it. If I were in college, that would be the essay I’d want to write. Even now, it’s tempting. Naturally, no one reads in a vacuum, but there is so much in the book that supports this feeling – I would love to discuss it with someone who had a different impression of it!

Of course, because I pulled an all nighter for this one, my memory of it is already a bit misty, like a dream. I really should go back and reread it, but the subject matter is not the kind of thing that invites return trips. Not because of the forementioned crudeness (which was an occasional thing in the latter half of the book, and fairly easily skipped), but the terrible depth of evil. Of blatant disregard for other people, of actual joy in using and hurting anyone perceived as weaker than ones-self. Of our willingness to close our eyes. . . . Once you’re out of it you feel free, like the mummy has finally been vanquished, the labyrinth escaped, the long night over. How could you go back? We cannot hide the darkness – ought not, maybe – but we can turn resolutely from it and run, even as it breaths down our backs and tangles around our ankles.

by Sixer

Poor Man’s Portmanteau

My career as an armchair traveler was hampered, in my younger years, by a complete willingness to enter into any world – real or fake – by its own terms. This was done with an innocent understanding of books as completely separate things, unrelated to this reality at all except as portals to get us out of it and into another a little more interesting. This, coupled with a dedicated ignorance of geography which defies imagination, kept me well grounded between two covers whenever reading of foreign nations and daring expeditions.{{1}}[[1]]It did not, somehow, keep me from assuming I would one day visit the Crystal Palace and see all those nice little exhibitions. Time can be a dangerous place to travel through casually.[[1]]

 

I think it was G. A. Henty’s The Young Carthaginian which finally birthed the inkling of an idea that some places in fiction could be traveled to physically as well as mentally. Trying to work out the passage of elephants across the atlas, I started in surprise to see such well known names all bunched together on the page, patiently awaiting my discovery. It wasn’t that I had thought them to be fake – not Switzerland, certainly, nor Scandinavia, France, Siberia, or any or them really.  It was more that the implications of their existence hadn’t ever quite occurred to me. All things in books are equally real while read, and so I lived as if they were all equally inconsequential when not. More than just being wrong, I found that by treating place names as pertinent only to the stories they were in I had twisted the globe into an impossible shape, where countries never touch or always touched, grew to grandiose dimensions or diminished into obscurity, depending on what I happened to be reading. The real world, I knew instantly then, was no such malleable thing, and the position of the different lines on the atlas was as important to the stories as anything else. They in fact informed, and were themselves informed by, not just the stories I read, but the story behind them – the greater tale known as history.

I wonder if I would have discovered all this a little bit sooner if I had read The Princess Passes as a child. Probably not – the rich, descriptive language used to describe impossible mountains and awful precipices would have made the story seem a fairytale, unspoiled by truth. But older now, and grounded both in the conviction that this world is more miraculous than any fairyland and the knowledge that the authors had motored through that part of the world themselves, and so could describe it firsthand, I am fully able to appreciate this book both as a well-written story and a window into a part of the world I might one day go.

Well written, of course, is one of those phrases which is tossed around for a number of reasons, and hardly tells anyone anything unless they already know it and agree. What I mean by it most times is that the use of language is exquisite. A book can be well put together, well executed, even well done without ever having achieved that best praise of all, well worded. Here that praise can be honestly given, for from Paris to Monte Carlo the scenery is painted with a fanciful, technicolored brush, sometimes to evoke a laugh sometimes a wishful sigh, but always to make us feel we know exactly how it would appear if we were standing on that balcony, or trudging along that narrow ridge.

Since I have been so obviously taken by the form, I will let you form your own opinion of the content. If I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it as a whole with the book and would consider it dull, if not a little insulting, to annex it merely to weigh and measure its many parts. I do have a particular soft spot for our main traveling companion, who fit neatly into the mold of most of my childhood heroes and produced such delightful metaphors – even now I can see rose petals falling softly onto the snowy mountain tops. Admittedly, part of my sympathy for the hero comes from Grant Hurlock’s excellent vocals, which gave serious dignity to such otherwise ethereal apparitions as lakes of melted emeralds and lapis lazuli skies. The other elements of the story, the plot and cast, are average and can be well summed up in the phrase “Shakperean rom-com.” Yes, it’s a romance, and it does get a bit treacly near the end.

When you find a book whose use of words elevates it above nice to truly good, and has a subject matter worthy of its efforts, it is hard to resist quoting it to all your friends. Luckily for us all, my memory is artlessly awful, especially when drawn from dictation, so if you too would like the sensation of visiting the alps without having to board a plane, you can find the audio recording of the book here.

by Sixer

TBR: Just for Shaw

This is another of those posts, written ages ago, which I am only just now putting up. Please bear with any references to dates or times and try not to chuckle too much over my optimism as I predict the future.

TBR: 4 /20

Following right on the heels of the Kabbalah, here is a text of a completely different sort: three plays of George Bernard Shaw. It’s difficult to know even what I am expected to review here. There is so much, but it feels rather more conducive to a book club than a book review because these plays (all accompanied with lengthy explanations by the author) are really just chock full of social commentary that begs to be debated. And yet, the commentary is rather the worse for being wrapped in the absurdities and witticisms that make them so delightful to read. For instance, despite Shaw’s lengthy introductory letter to his Man and Superman, I still cannot say for certain what the take away from his play was supposed to be except that: a) women are all devious and conniving in one way or another and, b) Hell is not an awful place nor even so very distant from heaven.

Interestingly, it’s opinions about religion and the sexes, and not eugenics or socialism or politics in general, that are spoken loudest throughout his plays. The quite frightening concept of Hell is repeated in his play Saint Joan, alongside a strange mix of cheap shots at, and blatant respect for, the catholic church. He spends his entire introduction defending the court that tried Joan originally and takes great pains to display them in the best light possible in the play itself, showing a consideration not just for the culture which would  surely have existed at that time, but for the heart and soul of the church itself. A soul that is in perfect odds with the apparent spiritual blindness of everyone else in the play, Joan excused – a disturbing reminder that, when faith is expected, it is very often only skin deep.

While that dichotomy warred its way through my brain, his proposition that Joan cemented not just protestantism, but also nationalism, filled me with delightful confusion. The idea of nationalism not being an idea is  . . . . difficult to imagine. Hasn’t it existed since Cain? How could the English and the French not think of themselves as such? But his reasoning, at least within the play, is quite clear, and it is hilarious to see the bishop unaware of how acknowledgment of the king as owner of the land, rather than the feudal lords, would lead to the dissolving of nobility (just as it’s rather sad to see his conclusion that the natural outcome of Protestantism would be a dissolution of all religions into one). If anyone knows of any books about the development and impact of nationalism as a concept in Europe, or any other nation, please share.

To summarize the other plays: Man and Superman makes a rather ambitious political statement about what romance really is, that is, woman’s compulsion by Nature to secure the best possible situation for having and rearing children. It is hard not to remember Chesterton’s comment about replacing God with a Goddess, for nature is a real force in this work, more real than any god or devil, and the characters can be divided into those who worship her and those who don’t. In the first camp we find thoughtless ignorants who mean well but see little and intelligent revolutionaries who see all but somehow still bungle everything. In the second camp there are women.

I think I will have to go back and read it again for a better impression, for I started out by hating Anne and hoping Jack could be well clear of her and finished by condemning him to her and thinking marrying her was exactly what he needed, and yet I’m still not sure what made me change my mind. Probably Jack’s complete surety that he had all the answers and was perfect and self-sufficient – see following paragraph. Obviously, the idea that women have nothing to do in the wooing process but sit and look pretty has never been anything more than {{1}}bunk (though sitting and being pretty are certainly good cards to play if you have them), even before the modern laws that Shaw constantly references as putting the power in woman’s hand so that men, at least in matters of home and hearth, are hardly their own masters once married. Any doubts, please see Dido. Or Ruth. Or any Austen book ever. All written years before Shaw was born. This being the case, it’s hard to take Anne’s aggressive wooing with anything but a raised eyebrow. However, Shaw himself fully admits that he has written Anne in response to a particular play, and that I am sure explains all her tasteless indiscretion away. It does not, however, make me very eager to read his inspiration.

As for Pygmalion, I have actually read this one before, though I was not then able to fully catch all the meanings. More to the point, there was a period some years back when we watched My Fair Lady all. The. Time. It was funny to see the lines I was so used to hearing, and to watch them be lengthened or shortened or put in a different context or, even, in a different mouth. I’m sorry that My Fair Lady didn’t emphasize more that Freddy was stone broke, for somehow it makes him more helplessly lovable and his inevitable marriage to Eliza more acceptable, whereas in the movie it is only a little pathetic. Eliza is too thoroughly modern for a Cinderella story, but Freddy is so old fashioned there seems little harm in making him a Cinderella man. And what in the world did H. G. Wells write?

Anyway, I feel Shaw basically shot himself in the foot at every turn with this play, for he proposes that it is meant to bring awareness of phonetics to the public attention when, really, it makes the matter somewhat of a silly hook (to an American in the 21st century) and instead illustrates the unthinking, shortsightedness of the main “educated” characters and the rather more practical bent of the flower girl from the gutter. That he calls it a romance is unfortunate, and shows that he himself suffers a little from shortsightedness. Seriously, if you consider the great majority of your audience as uneducated, as Shaw clearly does, why would you expect them to have any other assumption than “love story” when they are promised a romance? Luckily it is not that kind or romance (or really, any kind of romance), for Shaw is right: only that innate desire to show up insufferable egotists can lead us to match Eliza with Higgins. This is the same desire that rises in us occasionally with Sherlock (though, he is really much better than Higgins), or any other “Darcy” type (which, by the way, is a term which must go, for Darcy was never self-absorbed and only occasionally rude). I suspect when we do this we are casting around for a way in which to show such characters that they are not a man-among-men and love just happens to be the most convenient and most humiliating blight at hand. Plus, it implies a happy ending, so win-win. However, it’s not fair to Eliza to make her live with someone who will only ever care for her in the manner which he cares for his slippers just because he gets our backs up, and it is refreshing to see a character who can realize that’s so and therefore deftly nix the possibility in her head and heart and marry the man who is slavishly devoted to her. Rather like seeing another Elizabeth discard any plans of marrying Wickham when her aunt asks her what kind of income she expects him to have. Would that human’s were more often represented as having this much insight and control over their emotions.

So, the verdict: these plays are definitely worth reading. They are well written and full of concepts with which to stimulate our stagnating brains, or else merely put us in convulsions of laughter if the brain is too tired to come out. My favorite was Saint Joan, simply because it was new and such an interesting problem. It’s nice to read someone who you can understand, at least in theory, but still completely disagree with. It keeps the grey cells alive and working.

Having had such success with plays, I think I’ll move on to my three volumes of Shakespeare, cravenly choosing the more modern bard over some frightfully classic tragedies. Part of this is mental laziness, and part of this is the hope that familiarity will lend me speed. In theory I should be 14 books in by the end of July, but I think I’ll settle for 10 by the end of August.

[[1]]Footnote: Or should I say, Buncombe? I seem to be using this word an awful lot lately, and so I finally gave in and looked up its etymology. Guess what, it’s not British! Jolly rum discovery that, wot?[[1]]