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...

I'll admit that I came in to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with low expectations. I've been slowly losing interest in JK Rowling's version of the wizarding world for years now. More and more she sticks to a narrow, unresearched view of a world that pales in comparison with the things fans have come up with. She takes credit for diversity after the fact (revealing that Dumbledore is gay or allowing Hermione to be black) without ever explicitly including it in her work. (It shows up in this story in the obvious chemistry between Albus and Scorpius, paired with the shoe-horned in inevitability of Scorpius/Rose). I've been actively consuming Harry Potter fanfiction since I was in high school. Frankly, the world that the fans have come up with is more interesting and more thought-out than the so-called canon. I read this book mostly because I saw fans complaining about it, and I still love the franchise enough to see what all the fuss was about. And I paid full price ...

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...