I’ve not read all the Hogarth Shakespeare project books yet, but I do like literary adaptations of classic works. The Austen Project books have not all been amazing, but most of the interpretations have been original and engaging, and they’ve shown me how a classic work rooted in its time finds its legs in a different century. Tracy Chevalier, whose historical fiction is among the few that I will read as a matter of necessity (with the exception of At the Edge of the Orchard), […]
Lady, what are you hollering?
Well, I started the year off with a whimper. This book was glowingly recommended to me by a good friend who has led me in the past to some good stuff, so I jumped on it. I was disappointed, but the let-down was actually a little freeing, because I had just started another book she recommended, and my disappointment in Taking What I Like allowed me to give myself permission to put the other one down.* This is a book of short stories tied together […]
And so, lesbian Macbeth.
K, so first if you haven’t read Macbeth, um, why? Go do that. Second, this book is a pretty good adaptation of it, though not perfect. Talley translates the Scottish kings, lords, and various witches into the haunted setting of a boarding school that used to be a plantation in the antebellum south. Kings become teenage girls, witches become spirits, and what was straightforward murder in the original play becomes something more complicated here. Ultimately, this book was enjoyable, but I thought the first half […]
“O, full of scorpions is my mind!”
I’ve only read Macbeth once before now, and it was halfway through my undergrad, so I didn’t really remember anything about it other than, “Out, damned spot!” and the witches chanting “double, double toil and trouble”. Incidentally, I’m never going to forget that second one, because a) the film version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban turned it into a song (the kids were holding large toads?????), and b) It’s also the name of a Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen movie I watched […]
You’ll Be Accepting My Apology For Sucking At Life and Not Posting
So yeah, I’ve been away for a long time. So long in fact that I can’t even remember what review I’m on…but I KNOW that I have to be really close to a Cannonball based on what I’ve read, just not on what I’ve reviewed (edit: I looked back I think my last one was 35…let’s see how much closer I can get to a cannonball). I’m breaking the rules and reviewing all the books that I’ve neglected over the past few months…right now. Who’s […]
A wonderful, empowering ode to Shakespeare and women
I read scootsa 1000’s review of Exit, Pursued by a Bear and instantly thought, Yes, I very much want to read this book. I read Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (categorized as a romance) nine years ago in a Shakespeare seminar taught by one of my favorite undergraduate professors. In her planning of the class, she’d asked several majors if we’d like to do the typical tragedy-comedy dichotomy, and, to her infinite delight, we begged for the obscurer plays: the histories and the romances. Nerd moment: […]
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