Bookish Thoughts

The Tempest  may just win an award for the thing I've been intending to read for the longest time. Back in 6th grade, my drama teacher gave me a copy and told me that I'd like it because of the magical elements. And it's one of Shakespeare's shorter plays - an excellent entry point for a precocious tween. But I never got around to it. I know enough to recognize the references I see all around me. Prospero in Night Circus  and his disappointment when his daughter rejects the name Miranda. "Hell is empty and all the devils are here" quoted or misquoted every time we as a nation take another step backwards. Caliban's War  in the Expanse  series and Full Fathom Five  in the Craft Sequence . I finally decided that enough was enough. Surely I was missing even more references than I was recognizing. As my teacher recognized all those years ago, this is one of those foundational works that ought to be required for anyone with a healthy interest in SFF. So I pi...

This is my first attempt at Shakespeare in a non-classroom setting. I've read several plays before now ( Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Leer, and King John ), but they were all for assignments. And they were all really hard to get through. I have a tendency to get lost in the rhythm of Shakespeare's language. It flows so well that, without even realizing it, I'll have read two pages and retained nothing. I'll be so eager to finish a line that I won't even realize it's switched characters. I have difficulty keeping track of who's talking because that interrupts the flow of the language. To get around this, I used to go through and highlight each character in a different color before reading so I'd have a visual cue to keep me on track. But since I didn't want to do that to my fancy Complete Works (or carry that beast of a book around), I never got around to any plays that hadn't been assigned. Then Joss Whedon decided to make a fil...

The third installment in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is a collection of short stories, rather than a cohesive arc. However, a line from Death in the final issue helps tie all of the stories together thematically [M]ythologies take longer to die than people believe. They linger on in a kind of dream country that affects all of you. Each of the stories concerns an old mythology. Beliefs and figures that have passed into the realm of stories. Calliope : In the first tale, an author kidnaps the youngest muse and holds her hostage. He rapes her in an effort to get ideas and grows prosperous on his projects. She appeals to Morpheus to free her. He does this by flooding the author's mind with ideas, so many that he can't sort through them in any meaningful way. After Calliope is released, she elects to retire to the dream realm, to continue only in the minds of men. This may be my favorite story of the four collected in this volume. It's certainly the most ...