Book Log: Shakespeare's The Tempest

We read The Tempest over the Christmas holidays. It was a lot of fun. I've read it before - a couple of times, in fact, since I wrote a high school final on it - but Shakespeare can usually stand a reread. A bunch of the fun, though, was due to that pronoun at the beginning of the post: we read the play as a family, assigning parts as we went along and mostly avoiding having to converse with ourselves. (In fact, the only case where that happened was where we'd tried to assign parts at the beginning rather than on-the-fly.)

Two of us are somewhat inclined towards Shakespeare nerdery, had read the play before, expected to thoroughly enjoy it with the added bonus of fun family times and certainly did. Two of us are somewhat inclined towards general nerdery, don't generally read Shakespeare for fun, while approving of it in principle and enjoyed it enough to be keen to do it again (sadly we ran out of time - maybe next holidays, since it does take several hours to get through). Two of us are somewhat inclined to general nerdery, but seemed slightly surprised at how understandable the bard could actually be and enjoyed it enough to think it'd be nice to read one/some of the other famous plays. I think the first two of us found this somewhat satisfying. In general, a good time was had by all.

This was definitely a case where ereading devices were awesomely useful. Everybody had their own copy of the play, downloaded (for free!) from Project Gutenberg or Many Books or other ebook source of choice. (Some of us paid to get notes at the back, but I'm not sure how much those were used.) This was mostly on Android apps, but also a Kindle and a lone hard copy. It could probably be got to work using laptops too, although mobile devices are really convenient. This was way more effective than times we've tried to share hard copies, although there were a few educational moments when we discovered that different editions of the play may attribute the same lines to different people, so everybody is waiting for someone else to speak! I think it'd be worth trying to get the same edition across the board if we do it again, but the mix-ups were not the end of the world.

The play, of course, was good. The acting was frabjous. The entire exercise was loads of fun, less effort than slogging through reading it oneself and more doable than going to see a live performance in several dimensions (although I still want to do that, one day). I'd certainly like to do it again; and if you can find a handful of people willing to read Shakespeare out loud, I think you should do it too.

Wordless Wednesday: Roses

Book Log: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

So many other people wrote so little about The Night Circus when it was first published, many moons ago, that I'm a little uncertain when it comes to saying much myself. However, the desire of inflicting my opinions upon the world at large seems to have overcome the uncertainty and here we are.

Many descriptions of The Night Circus have been along the lines of "It's otherwordly and wonderful and you have to read it yourself to understand." I would guess that a large chunk of that is because the book is written in present tense. And parts of it are even in second person. It's weird. It definitely gives an immersive effect, but it did feel a bit gimmicky at times. The confusion of time is definitely part of the circus itself, though. That confusion is enhanced by the three interwoven but distinct plot threads which progress at different speeds. It's quite possible to follow, but it does mess with your sense of time - which is the nature of le cirque des reves.

Morgenstern does, in my opinion, a fantastic job of conveying atmosphere. Le cirque des reves is, as the name suggests, whimsical and wondrous. It's as if a dream you didn't want to wake up from has somehow been committed to paper. Despite that, I don't think the novel is about its setting in the way that something like Gulliver's Travels is. The circus is a medium through which various characters can express themselves - particularly Celia Bowen. Celia has a love interest, but the novel isn't a romance. Likewise, she has a life's work, but if the novel were about the circus in itself, it would need a quite different frame. We meet little Miss Bowen very early in the novel and by the end - well, you wouldn't want me to ruin that for you.

The novel follows Celia Bowen's life in a bildungsroman fashion that I tend to associate with Dickens, although it's certainly been used by any number of authors. Celia's growth and the development of her interactions with the world - although it almost seems more apt to say the world's interactions with Celia - form the substance of the book. When one of those interactions is le cirque des reves, that's fairly substantial.

I very much enjoyed The Night Circus. The characters were vivid (or strikingly not so) and fascinating, I found the plot compelling and the themes of atmosphere and illusion thought-provoking as well as beautiful. This is definitely a book I would recommend.

Adventures in Tie-Dyeing

Friday Five

1. We (the family) watched Part I of The Lord of the Rings tonight. For the first time. Not because we live under a rock (though I sometimes wonder about that), but because the movie can't live up to the book, a.k.a. the actual (possibly historical?) events. It was fun nonetheless and may push me into actually rereading the book for the umpteenth time, but the first in several years, for which: hurrah!

2. I miss having a really good public library close to where I live, as when growing up. I think I need to join the okay library in town and figure out some not-too-heavy public domain books to put on my Kindle app to combat this.

3. "But Charlotte," you say, "a soft copy book has no mass, so it can't be heavy." Or perhaps you don't, because you're strange. (That means "not like me," right?) I'm pretty sure there's some kind of literary field, akin to the Higgs, that means books can be heavy even when they aren't massive. That's how it works. Happy now? (Oh, you weren't unhappy to begin with? Strange.)

4. Hmm, I wonder if that field applies to bookbags too. I'm trying to sew one, but having a little trouble with the machine. I'm told I need to adjust the tension, but even when I get really tense, it doesn't work like I expect. Perhaps tomorrow I'll try twiddling the dial on the side of the machine.

5. It's great fun to have time for so many holiday projects. Hopefully a few can linger on into termtime, but even if they don't, hurrah for the chance to have such a thorough break before throwing myself back into the crazy, delightful whirlpool of the new semester.

Wordless Wednesday: Summer Holidays

What You Will

You can't see that Malvolio's cross-gartered stockings are bright yellow.

I have been lucky enough to recently come into possession of an Android phone. One of my favourite things about having such a clever phone is the Kindle app. I can put so many beautiful books in my pocket and there are many many many of them for which I don't even have to pay. A consequence of this is that this morning I (re)read Twelfth Night. I first read it in high school, inspired, I think, by Shakespeare in Love, which was our grade twelve English film study. (I know I wrote an essay comparing the film and the play, but I don't remember exactly why I chose that topic or if I read the play specifically for the essay.) I realised recently that I haven't touched Shakespeare since starting university and today I remembered just why that really is a pity.

Plays are fun to read and Shakespeare is just plain clever. I can fly from my cosy curled-up armchair spot to the Globe theatre; to the private showing at Candlemas 1602; to a performance in a modern theatre; to the director's chair at rehearsals; to the tech crew's  scaffolding and lighting board; to that half-enchanted land of Illyria where, ghost-like, I anxiously watch Viola extract herself from the horrible mess that Sir Toby and Fabian have taken it upon themselves to create. It's quite glorious. I daresay I miss some things and misinterpret others; but the stuff wasn't written, I don't think, so much to be analysed as to be enjoyed. Analysis will inevitably proceed from the enjoyment and some folk will carry that out in great detail. That is one good thing. Also a good thing is those of us left feeling awfully lucky that there's another play and another and another to be downloaded at the click of a button.