As I Like It

William Shakespeare

As You Like It (1599)

It turns out, not so much.

I guess I'm just not much of a fan of the fantasy world of Arden, and the plot device of romantic partners masquerading as someone else and testing or proving a love. Or, in this case, the Yentl move of cross-dressing and wooing nevertheless.

I also remember not liking A Midsummer Night's Dream that much. But, hey, I still read 'em.

I'd love to get behind some of the stuff and it's probably fun to perform. (The Kenneth Branagh movie, though. Hm.)

Anyway, on a positive note, I'll leave with this, by Celia:

O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all whooping!

(Dang, that man could write!)

The Rubicon

For the past two weeks I've been reading this book nightly. The Rubicon is a hard book to categorise - although it is historical non fiction (has footnotes and all), Tom Holland tells the History of the Roman Republic in a compelling storytelling manner. The Rubicon (the first of Tom Hollands Historical books) can be summed up as 'Truth is stranger than fiction' or should i say 'Truth is more entertaining than fiction'.

In the first year of my undergrad degree, i did a year of 'Ancient civilisations' which focused on Rome and Greece. In all the books I've read on the subject of Rome, I think The Rubicon does an excellent job of telling the story of Rome - like a panoramic picture of its beginnings to the end - without too much (or overwhelming) detail to bog down the reader. This, i think, is the key to the success of this book - you don't have to be a scholar to comprehend and read this, and it isn't too clustered with details or differing academic opinions to leave you confused. Tom holland makes assumptions based on facts (lets you know he has) and gets back to the juicy details of the story.

Definitely this book though isn't a hero worship of Caesar or Augustus but gives a warts and all view of the political horizon of Rome, and of course (as he says in his preface) focuses beyond the typical 'main players' and shows the reasoning behind it all. My only fault is that there isn't a huge focus on the most epic moments (which almost feel anti-climatic) like Caesars murder or Antony and Cleopatra's suicides. He mentions them and moves on. However it should be noted that Tom Holland makes the point in the preface that this is a book about 'Rome and its people' and i think deliberately underplays the 'most known' parts so as not to swamp the message.

So to sum up, buy this book and read it! Even if history is not your cuppa, this is a exciting read! Can't wait to pick up his other two: Persian Fire and Millenium.

Linda P Review *The Triumph Of Deborah *Eva Etzioni-Halevy

Synopsis

The richly imagined tale of Deborah, the courageous Biblical warrior who saved her people from certain destruction

In ancient Israel, war is looming. Deborah, a highly respected leader, has coerced the warrior Barak into launching a strike against the neighboring Canaanites. Against all odds he succeeds, returning triumphantly with Asherah and Nogah, daughters of the Canaanite King, as his prisoners. But military victory is only the beginning of the turmoil, as a complex love triangle develops between Barak and the two princesses.

Deborah, recently cast off by her husband, develops a surprising affinity for Barak. Yet she struggles to rebuild her existence on her own terms, while also groping her way toward the greatest triumph of her life.

Filled with brilliantly vivid historical detail, The Triumph of Deborah is the absorbing and riveting tale of one of the most beloved figures in the Old Testament, and a tribute to feminine strength and independence.

I mostly choose to read this book in the hopes that it would be as good as The Red Tent. Sadly it was not but it as still very enjoyable.
I knew nothing about Deborah before reading this book. But after reading the book and this short article on Wikipedia. I feel know a little more about her story. But the book does not focus only on Deborah. We also learn about Barak and the women in his life. It kind of felt like a biblical Harlequin romance novel. He loves her, she loves someone else, someone else loves him. It was difficult to keep people partners straight sometimes. But the story was engaging. Recommend for those who enjoy biblical fiction and romance.

Matthew, Book Review, *Paul Auster, *Collected Prose, *Lord Berners, *First Childhood, *A Distant Prospect

My health has kept me absent from this blog as of late, and I've got another surgery coming up so I'll be returning to absentia in the near future, but in the meantime I'm going to take care of all the reviews that've been waiting patiently for me to get around to writing them.

Collected Prose (2003) by Paul Auster is just that, a collection of the author's various nonfiction works. Two of the these, The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth, have been published previously as individual books and are still widely available, but the rest of the collection is comprised of shorter works culled from a variety of sources that are harder to find. As in most collections, the works included are of varying quality and the shorter works tend towards essays on French writers and loosely organized lists of stray thoughts and anecdotes, but on the whole I found the collection reasonably interesting and enjoyable.

The Invention of Solitude (1982) focuses on the author's father, then recently deceased. Through a mixture of autobiography, biography, and philosophical rumination, Auster explores how his father's family and past shaped him into the person he became, and how his father's influence in turn shaped the person Auster himself became. The narrative falls apart towards the end as Auster's peregrinations through various abstract lines of thought begin to push everything else to the periphery, but that seems to happen more out of a reluctance to stop writing the work than any loss of focus on his part. As he explains earlier in the text,

In spite of the excuses I have made for myself, I understand what is happening. The closer I come to the end of what I am able to say, the more reluctant I am to say anything. I want to postpone the moment of ending, and in this way delude myself into thinking that I have only just begun, that the better part of my story still lies ahead. No matter how useless these words might seem to be, they have nevertheless stood between me and a silence that continues to terrify me. When I step into this silence, it will mean that my father has vanished forever.

Hand to Mouth (1997) is an account of Auster's early years as a writer and the struggles he endured as a result of his decision to make his living solely through writing. Granted, there are a great many times I found myself wanting to shout GET A DAY JOB YOU DOOF at the page, but aside from that urge I found the work to be an engaging, sobering look at the economic realities of pursuing a career as a professional writer. There's also a brief, hilarious interlude in which he tries unsuccessfully to sell a baseball card game of his own invention to various game manufacturers. (When Hand to Mouth was printed in hardback, several pages in the middle of the book were dedicated to color reproductions of every card for the game, which I suppose was his way of finally getting the damn thing published.)

When I first started reading Lord Berners' autobiography First Childhood (1934) and its sequel A Distant Prospect (1945), I wasn't sure I was going to like it terribly much. Most of the first chapter or so is comprised of descriptions of the opulence of his family and ancestral home, but after he gets done telling the reader just how rich his family is (and then telling the reader again, and again, and...) Berners settles into a fun, light narrative. First Childhood follows his life from birth up through his first four years at a boarding school, and A Distant Prospect picks up from there and follows Berners through his time as a student at Eton where he first began to indulge his interest in the arts and music in particular. I know that probably sounds like thin gruel for one book, let alone two, but the narrative is helped along by Berners' knack for understated humor:

At Eton the method of teaching the Classics was very much the same as it had been at Elmley. That is to say, no effort was spared to make them as uninteresting and unprofitable as possible. It is to be presumed that the school authorities, in making the Classics the principal item of their curriculum, had some edifying purpose in view, but if they thought that the study of pagan modes of thought was going to be useful to young Christians, it looked as if the masters thought otherwise and were bent on diverting the attention of their pupils to questions of syntax. In their hands Homer became tedious, Horace commonplace and Greek Tragedy a grammatical Inferno; and they contrived that the works were studied in so piecemeal a fashion that it was quite impossible to understand what they were about.

And I bet you thought your high school teachers were bad.

Book Review - Water Music + Status Update

Hi Everyone,

I've been away, sucked into that drug of a book Infinite Jest, (which I have still not finished, and now must go back and start over). I've put it aside now awhile in order to get back on my FITG list.

I just finished Water Music by T.C. Boyle and I liked it quite a lot. Recommendations go out to the rest of you who like fast moving stories, adventure in Africa, and totally deranged plot twists. It was a great read and assuming I don't get hit by the proverbial bus anytime in the near future, won't be my last encounter with Mr. Boyle. Any author who makes a bushpig say: “snark snark” has a firm place on my Authors-To-Read-More-Of list.

My full review is at my blog.

I've also finished: The House of Spirits (Isabel Allende), On Beauty (Zadie Smith), The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz), The Spanish Bow (Andromeda Ramano-Lax), and most recently The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (Tom Spanbauer - swoon) but not written reviews yet, so they don't quite count according to my (personal) rules.

Emily, I see you have been busy! The site is looking greater than ever! Thanks for all your work.

Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Charles Dickens

In the Book Club Of My Mind, I often play the game of whom I might cast in which role if I were to make a movie of the book I’m reading.* In this case I’m not even sure who’d get top billing, so I checked out imdb and noticed that Sydney Carton seems to get it almost unanimously, save for the odd exception of Dr. Manette.

Obviously a movie has to emphasize individuals and personal relationships.

The novel, however, seems to emphasize the force of History (to be grand) or the Mob (to be bitter) and every character is in relationship to it, as are the two titular cities.

For those of you who have read it, I’ll just remind you of the names. Dr. Manette, Mr. Lorry, Lucie Manette, Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay (Evremonde), Mr. Cruncher, the Defarges, Miss Pross, Stryver, and other more minor characters. Right? None of them carry the action, per se.

Great book, great final scene. Of course much depends on strange coincidences, but who isn’t willing to accept some of these in exchange for the fine writing.

(That said, Dickens isn’t the best subway reading, so I’ve had to spend quite a few end-of-chapter moments standing on the platform after getting off the train just to make sure I got the gist of the chapter I was on.)

My favorite melancholic line is by Mr. Jarvis Lorry, talking about his youth, “when […] my faults were not confirmed in me.”

The quote in context:

Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence of a few moments, said:

“I should like to ask you: -- Does your childhood seem far off? Do the days when you sat at your mother’s knee, seem days of very long ago?”

Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry [who admitted to being 78 years old] answered:

“Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me.”

* For what it’s worth, my usually jokey suggestion of Keanu Reeves in the main role is not too bad here, since the character needs some otherworldly distance. And that actress who plays Lizzy’s older sister in the newer Pride and Prejudice (I looked it up: Rosamund Pike) would be a good Lucie. Dr. Manette? Peter O’Toole. And my dear Mr. Lorry, not sure yet. Oh: Ed Asner.

Sweeney Todd and the String of Pearls

Before posting my review of the most recent book I've read for the Fill in the Gaps list, I thought I'd include some information that might be of interest to readers/reviewers here. I am the book reviews editor at Sloth Jockey, an online literary journal. If you would like some of the reviews of the books on your Fill in the Gaps list to appear there, you can contact me, and I'd be happy to include them at the site. Here's the call for submissions I usually post at other sites:

Sloth Jockey, an online literary magazine, is open for submissions. Please view the guidelines page and send your poems, stories, flash fiction, essays, art, and music in for consideration. Sloth Jockey also reviews books regularly. If you'd like your book or magazine to be reviewed at the site, or if you would like to submit a review of a book or magazine, please see the guidelines page. Sloth Jockey is not yet a paying market, but the editors are working toward that.

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Right. So, on to my review of Sweeney Todd and the String of Pearls.

The 2007 play written by Yuri Rasovsky is based on the old story in the Sweeney Todd penny dreadful. It's wicked and funny, and more than a little twisted. This is the older version of the story, slightly different from the one filmed in 2007 starring Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, based on the 1979 Stephen Sondheim musical). In this version, Todd is just wicked and greedy, rather than a man tormented after his wife and child were ruthlessly torn from him by a powerful, evil man. Unlike the villain in the musical and movie, this Sweeney Todd isn't driven by a need for revenge, but by a desire to line his pockets with the wealth carried on the person of one customer after another.

The dialogue in the text is really funny, and the way the story moves along is full of twists and turns that make it a lot of fun to read. I can imagine watching this on the stage — it would be a real riot!

If you like the stage at all, and like reading a good play, Sweeney Todd and the String of Pearls is one worth picking up.

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I also finished another title on my list recently, House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones, and posted my response at one of my other blogs.

Same goes for Brighton Rock.