MORE catchup!

I don't know why I'm finding it so hard to update this thing this year, but I am. So here's a whole whack of books I've read and only a little bit about them. Sigh. I need to get back on the timely update train.

Book # 14: Kingdom of the Grail by Judith Tarr - I'd read another book of hers way back when, it was about King John I of England and how he wasn't actually a huge jerk, just misunderstood. It was ok, but I sure didn't love it. I saw this book in a used bookstore and of course went Grail! Arthur! So let's just say I was a little surprised when reading the cover blurb that no, not Arthur... Roland? Hmm ok then. I don't really know too much about the whole Roland, Charlamange tales. I know a little, but not a lot, so I figured ah what the heck, let's give it a try. (Plus a friend of mine's new PC in our RPGs was of Roland's lineage, so I thought this would be fun to try out). Overall, not bad. Roland's got magical powers and is a relation of Merlin's. There is a big Grail quest, and lots of Grail lore that I thought worked out fine. Nothing earth shattering going on here, but enjoyable enough.

Book #15: The Iron King by Maurice Druon - This is another in the 'read ALL the source material for ASoIaF' initiative. Well ok, that's really not possible, so this is part of my 'read ALL the source material for ASoIaF that GRRM says is source material for ASoIaF'. Having gone through Costain's meditations on the Plantagents, I decided to check out Druon's books for the French side of things. As despite my many, many readings of English history, I don't know much of the French side of what happened. So this book is a French translation about the latter part of the reign of Philip the Fair, contemporary of Edward I and II of England. Philip is responsible for the destruction of the Knights Templar and the relocation of the papal court to Avingnon. I can see why GRRM lists these novels as an inspiration for ASoIaF because there is a LOT of court intrigue going on. Affairs and curses and traps and all sorts of fun stuff. Bonus being this is all historical! I am interested in continuing on with this series.

Book #16: The Tyrant's Law by Daniel Abraham - The 3rd book in Abraham's Coin and Dagger series. Things are definitely ramping up. Geder has launched the Spider Cult in other countries he is busily invading and is just becoming more and more reprehensible. And you can tell that deep, deep down he knows this, or at least this is why I assume he's allowed Jory to re-enter court life despite the treason his father committed? Or perhaps it is just selfishness in that Jory was always nice to Geder. I don't know. I think the best though is that Clara has become a one-woman resistance force, reaching out to anyone who might be able to help wrest the country away from Geder. Cithrin becomes more of a major player, but in trying to use Geder's love for her to help others, she's just placed herself in a very dangerous predicament. We know Geder is very big on revenge. And we also have West's quest to find a way to destroy the Spider Cult. While it initially ends in disappointment, a VERY game-changing discovery is made later. Abraham keeps everything moving forward very nicely. And I'm glad he gets one of these books out pretty quickly.

Book #17: Becoming Shakespeare by Jack Lynch - A very interesting look at how Shakespeare's plays survived through the ages, allowing for the 'cult' of Shakespeare we have now. He examines different publications of the plays, and a very good look at productions through the years and how the plays were changed or adapted for the times they were shown in, and even how today we don't get the 'pure' Shakespeare we've tricked ourselves into thinking we do, mainly because there wasn't really a 'pure' Shakespeare to begin with.

Boook #18: The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King - Yes, I am a masochist who went back to the world of the Dark Tower. But as this was another book telling a tale from Roland's past, I thought I'd try it. I'm fond of Dark Tower books where half the main characters don't show up much. This was one of them. It's also an interesting narrative, since King is telling a story within a story, and I liked that aspect of it. It doesn't have the same emotional weight that Wizards and Glass had, but overall, this was a nice re-visit with the Dark Tower. It takes some of the bad taste that was left in my mouth after finishing the series away.

Book #19: The Kingmaking by Helen Hollick -  Historical Arthur is a bit of a douchecanoe, but I'll let it go. There's no magic, no Lancelot... yeah, the elements I like best in my Arthurian legends are not here.

Book #20: Pendragon's Banner by Helen Hollick - See above.

Book # 21: The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker - Wow I enjoyed this book. Blew right through it. A lovely, charming, sad and even suspenseful tale of immigration to NYC, but told through the eyes of two fantastic creatures from other worlds; a djinn and a golem. They both find themselves in turn of the century NYC alone and very, very lost. The jinni is a magnificent, selfish and restless creature, trapped centuries before, only to be reawakened by a lowly tin-smith in the Arab speaking portion of NYC. The golem, created to be a perfect wife for a man who dies on the voyage over, has no master, no one to truly serve, and she is lost and vulnerable without one. The two creatures try to fit in, but they find it so difficult to, and once they find each other, they see they can be themselves, but their natures are so very different, and theirs is still a tumultuous relationship. Throw into this mix the creator of the golem trying to find her and you also have a wonderful villain in the mix. I highly recommend this one.

Arthur meets Shakespeare

Book #25: The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips.

When I first heard of this book, my immediate reaction was (excuse the swearing) FUCK YEAH! It combines two of my very favourite things; Shakespeare and Arthurian Legends. More specifically, a supposed lost play about King Arthur, written by Shakespeare. Fuck yeah again!

The bulk of this book is Arthur Phillips' 'Introduction' to the previously unknown play The Tragedy of Arthur, discovered and given to him by his dying father. Now, this would be remarkable on it's own... a completely unknown play? This isn't even like Cardinio or Love's Labours Found, plays we know existed, but don't have the texts for, no, there is no record whatsoever of this play. Which makes Phillips wary. Why? Because his father is a con man, more specifically, a forger.

So Phillips lays out his extremely complicated relationship with his father, and with his twin sister Dana, and even with Shakespeare. Phillips has no love for the Bard, and he makes this abundantly clear. So of course, he is the one his father enlists (and not Shakespeare loving Dana) to shepherd this play into publication. Which is very interesting, because it means Phillips is fairly skeptical from the beginning of the play's authenticity. 

So after the introduction, we get to the play itself. That's right, the actual play is included in it's entirety. It's no Hamlet, but it's enough like Shakespeare's early plays to pass for one. The language is quite perfect, but it really doesn't have that extra bit of magic, of playfullness, that Shakespeare is so capable of. But still, the play is done well enough and there were some lovely scenes in it. 

I'll probably end up reading the play a few times, just for fun :) 

(and yes, I am aware that there was an actual incident of  forged Shakespearean plays, 'found' in the 1790s, called Vortigern and Rowena (the other was Henry II). Vortigern,  was the British warlord/king that  Arthur Pendragon's family defeated for the throne of Britain)

Book # 3: How Shakespeare Changed Everything by Stephen Marche.

I'm a Shakespeare groupie. Not only do I like (or love) reading his plays, but I've always been very interested in reading about them and about him. So I grabbed this book during my last trip to Stratford (Ontario) last summer as it looked fun.

It's... ok. Marche's ideas are sound; yes, Shakespeare introduced more words into the English language than any other writer before or since, yes he challenged social attitudes of the time with controversial characters such as Othello and Shylock, yes his plays were the basis for a lot of Freud's work... but the problem with this book is there's just not enough depth to any of these. You could (and there have been) entire books on their own written on these topics. And the problem is, I've already read quite a few books written on these various topics.

I admire Marche's passion for the subject, that comes through very obviously, but I can't get past how shallow this book is, especially as I know there's so much more depth. And some of the chapters, like the one on Tolstoy, while amusing, didn't really fit into the overall theme of this book.

Not to sound like a snob here, but this is a nice book for someone who'd like a nice introduction on the length and breadth of Shakespeare's influence and his life and his writings... but that's about it.

Ugh. This one took me awhile. Re-watching all of Lost is not conduscive to getting anything done other than re-watching all of Lost...

Book number 14 (only 14! ouch) is Contested Will by James Shapiro. As you may have gathered from this blog by now, I'm a bit of a Shakespeare groupie. Not only do I love reading and watching his plays, but I also really enjoy reading scholarly works about him and his plays. Yes, this is a hold over from my university degree of choice. I'm usually open to all sorts of theories about Shakespeare, or different interpretations of his plays, but if there is one thing I refuse to believe, or give much credit to, it is the (various) theories that someone (or someones) other than Shakespeare wrote his plays. And that is what this book is about.

Normally, I wouldn't have given a book like this a second look, my dislike of the authorship question is so great, but I knew Shapiro was coming at it from a place I could comfortably get behind: Shapiro himself believes that Shakespeare wrote his plays (and yes, some of them were collaberative, but he still had his hand in them), but he gives the history and some of the reasoning why people believe that there is no way a 'simple man from Stratford' could have written all those magnificent works.

Shapiro goes through the main candidates; Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe, etc., and also talks about some of the famous people who have bought into the authorship controversy (such as Freud, Helen Keller, Mark Twain and Henry James) and lays out their evidence (or rather the lack thereof as far as I'm concerned) and the history of each of these movements. I did find it interesting on how the arguments really do lack any hard proof (which is usually also a main resoning of why they believe William of Stratford didn't write the plays; there's no 'proof'), and that they refute Shakespeare because 'he just couldn't have'. Even though I thought Shapiro was being as fair as he could be towards these theories, they still sound like crackpot theories often devised by crackpots. Despite all the evidence Shapiro lays out, I came nowhere near believing that Shakespeare didn't write his plays.

Shapiro also gives, of course, a defending chapter on Shakespeare. It actually seems remarkably slim, and that's because there isn't a lot of hard evidence that the detractors seem to want. But there are poems from contemporaries such as Ben Jonson who basically tell us that William Shakespeare of Stratford was the playwrite. Shakespeare's place in the world of Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre was well assured. He had powerful patrons (including James I) and obviously made a good living from the theatre. His plays were collected after his death and published in a manner that few things were published in at the time (an expensive folio edition), because the publishers knew the plays had to be preserved and that there was a market for them. Also, these were men who knew Shakespeare personally.

Overall, for me, this book just reiterated what I always believed, that no one else but Shakespeare could've written his plays. So I will continue to be endlessly annoyed when anyone brings up the whole 'what about the theory that such and such wrote Shakespeare's plays?' Pure bunk as far as I'm concerned.

Ugh. I'm only finished two books now. Book number 2 for the year is Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer. Yes, that Germaine Greer. Anyway, this book is exactly what it sounds like, it is a 'biography' of Shakespeare's wife, the much vilified Ann Hathaway. But the thing is, and this is the crux of Greer's entire book, it WHY is it popular in scholarly works about Shakespeare, to vilify his wife so? This ill-treatment of a woman who perhaps didn't deserve to be branded so is based pretty much on only three things; that Shakespeare didn't move his family to London when he was there, that we don't know how often he journeyed home to Stratford during his years in London and, finally (and supposedly the most damning evidence), he left Ann his second-best bed in his will.

There is little actual documented evidence left over about Shakespeare, and really even less about Ann. But over the years, it has been fairly widely 'accepted' that Shakespeare and Ann did not have a happy marriage, that she basically trapped him (she was older than he and she was pregnant when they married) and he resented her for this in all their years together, so basically abandoned his wife and children for his career in London.

But Greer does her best to offer plausible arguments to refute this. She painstakingly sifts through records of common lives of contemporaries of Shakespeares’, and she contends that back then there was nothing unusual in a baby’s being born six months after a marriage. She also demonstrates that an unmarried woman in her mid-20s would not have been considered exceptional or desperate. Ann Hathaway, Greer argues, was likely to be literate, and given the relative standing of their families in Warwickshire, she may very well have been considered a more desirable match than her husband. So there all you Ann haters. Greer also puts forth the idea that Shakespeare may not have supported his family financially, and so makes Ann very capable of many domestic tasks that would allow her to be financially independent, which was also not a stretch for the time, according to documents left from the era.

Of course, all this is pure speculation on Greer's part. She does her best to back it up by using all available documents she can find and read from the times, and sometimes this proof does get hard to slog through. The vast cast of characters Greer introduces from Stratford (and other places) gets to be difficult to keep track of, and sometimes, the detail is so overwhelming that I found myself forgetting what it was Greer was trying to use these anecdotes in defense of.

But overall, Greer paints a picture of a woman who is extremely capable, loyal and intelligent. Greer's Ann is much more interesting than anyone has ever given her credit for being in the past, and I found myself hoping that Ann was closer to Greer's thesis, because otherwise, it makes all of Shakespeare's beautiful writings on love seem a little more empty.*

*I've never bought into the idea that some of Shakespeare's sonnets were written to a man, given the way homosexuality was condemned in Elizabethan England. For Shakespeare to have written such blatant offerings to a man would have been incredibly ill-advised. Greer does touch on this in her book as well, and I found myself thinking her explanations made much more sense. Oh, and I also hated the movie Shakespeare in Love. Pure bunk.

Ack. So bad with updating... Too much stuff happening what with new house and, since getting new house, have also learned that I am pregnant. Which may mean I'll have more time to write during the summer, when I'm up at all hours, struggling to stay awake. Or not. Who knows.

So, what have I read since my 'year end' post in February?

Books #1 and 2 were cheesy romance novels because my brain just wasn't up for anything taxing just after moving. Surprisingly, one of them was pretty good, even though I can't remember the name of it right now.. The other, Once A Rebel, pretty standard romance stuff, but with pirates, so that's a bonus.

Book #3 was The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. It's a gorgeous book, a throwback to such tales as "The Turn of the Screw, Wuthering Heights and Rebecca. A 'ghost' story without being a ghost story, and also a love letter to books and reading, I highly recommend this one and should really do a more in depth analysis of it. Truly gripping.

Book #4 was Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt. This book is a fabulous companion to Bill Bryson's Shakespeare because it is the complete opposite. Where Bryson's book pointed out how little we actually know about Shakepseare, Greenblatt's book takes what little we know and extrapolates from that. It is essentially historical fiction, but it works. There's long been (silly) questions about how a not increadibly educated man from rural England could've written all those marvelous works, but Greenblatt does a superlative job of taking what we know about Shakespeare and logically extrapolating how he could've written all those marvelous plays. A bit of a heavy read, but an extremely interesting one.

Book #5 was Wicked by Gregory Maguire. I thought this was a very interesting idea, and I generally like famous works told from another view point (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), but there was something about the execution of this novel that I just found... off. I liked the politicizing of Oz, and Elphaba was made fairly sympathetic (but perhaps not enough so?), but once the story did meet up with the actual Wizard of Oz events, I found it really didn't work. Somehow, Elphaba's actions as the Wicked Witch that Dorothy met didn't match the actions of the person we'd been reading about up till then and I found that jarring. Not a great book, but not too bad either.

I've done a bunch of re-reads as well at this point, but now with having a library right down the street, I'm aiming on going there regularly and so being able to up the new reads this year. Hopefully.

Numero 27 this year is Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Funny enough, this is one of his plays that I somehow avoided reading til now. I know some classes read it in Grade 11, but mine wasn't one of them (we did... wow, I don't think we did any Shakespeare in grade 11 English now that I think about it. Heresy!). This choice was mainly born out of my recently having watched the entire first season of the HBO series Rome and enjoying that immensely. So, I was curious to see how their version stacked up to the Bard's. HBO's Julius at least got an almost full season before he got offed, Shakespeare's exits the mortal coil at the beginning of Act III, leaving two more acts where he only appears breifly and as a ghost.

Strangely, I found Ceasar to be almost a bit player in a play supposedly about him. I didn't find we got to really know too much about him, most of the time is given to the consipirators and their reasoning for wanting Caesar dead. Which is fine, motivation is good, but still, I think I would've liked more knowledge of Caesar as a counterpoint to the conspirators.

Shakespeare does do a lovely job with Marc Antony though. He is brash and angry, but he also does believe in what Caesar did and so his complete condemnation of the assassination was well done.

I liked the play overall, but I think I liked HBO's version better :)

Annnnnd number 26 of the year was actually finished a couple of weeks ago, but between work being an all-consuming bitch and buying a house, I haven't had much time to say anything about it. So here we are at Shakespeare by Bill Bryson.

I like Bill Bryson's work, I've read a few of them now. I find his interest in the English language very... well, interesting. As my husband often points out, I am a literary geek and that is true. Bryson's look at Shakespeare has resulted in a rather slim tome, since Bryson has resisted extrapolating or even making things up for Shakespeare's biography. Instead, Bryson takes the very little we actually KNOW about the Bard and then mainly debunks a lot of things we don't actually know about the Bard. Which really is a lot.

It's not a long read, but its a good read and a must read for anyone who is interested in the venerable William Shakespeare.

I went to Stratford (Ontario) last Sunday to get my Shakespeare on and it was a fabulous time. My main reason for going was because Colm Feore, undoubtedly my favourite Canadian actor, was back at Stratford after an absence of some years, and I was determined to see him in something. He's playing the lead in one of the Bard's lesser known plays, Coriolanus, and he was magnificent as always.

So, what does this have to do with what I'm reading? Simple, I'm now reading Coriolanus. I read it once, years ago, in university, but I wanted to read it again. The main character, Caius Martius, is unabashedly a great warrior. His entire being, his entire raison d'etre, is tied to him being a soldier. It is what he is good at, and he knows this and is secure in this. He has nothing but disdain for the common populace of Rome (mainly because they do not fight) and it is because of this that he gets into deep trouble when he attempts to become a politician. It is often said that this is Shakespeare's most political of plays, even more so than Julius Ceasar or Henry V, and I have to agree. Rome as a city, as a political entity in herself, is just as much of a character as anyone else.

And Martius himself is a very interesting character. I just finished the first true battle scene with him in it, and the way he rallies his troops, by almost shaming them into being brave, is just so different from Henry V (who is probably my favourite Shakespearean soldier) who's St. Crispian's Day speech spurs on his hopelessly outnumbered army by stressing brotherhood and the honour of fighting alongside one another. Not so Martius, while he does lead by example, he sees very little brotherhood amongst his own army, in fact, he feels closest comradeship with his greatest enemy, Aufidius. He and Martius have an intense, love/hate relationship that one could easily make a case for becoming sexual by the play's third act. It's fascinating.

I also picked up a couple of other books, Wyoming Stories, another collection of short stories by Annie Proulx, and a book called The Last Knight, which is about the end of the 14th century. I look forward to getting to both of those.

I'm also re-reading The Mirror of her Dreams by Stephen Donaldson, mainly as research as I get back to writing my novel. I had always seen my heroine as slightly... reactionary at the beginning, but I don't want her to be completely passive, because I find that unlikeable. Terisa, in these books, is completely passive at the start, and quite unlikeable, I've always found I wanted to give her a good shake. But eventually, she does find her talent and is able to break out of her passivity, so I find she's not a bad model to look at. But I don't want quite her extreme, so she's also a good example of what I don't want to do.