Bookstorm

"I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall."

Work was ridiculously busy tonight (and has been for the last few weeks) and that's about as far as I got with William Shakespeare's King Lear.

I'm exaggerating. I didn't quite finish the first scene of act one, but maybe King Lear wasn't the best choice of book to take to work. I love Shakespeare, but his language takes getting used to. One of the last of Shakespeare's plays I read was The Tempest, and it wasn't until the second or third act that I was able to (largely) abandon the footnotes, and that will likely be the case with King Lear. Still, King Lear is pretty enjoyable. I winced at Lear's actions and at Kent's implication that Lear is insane. And I snickered at some of the sexual references ("Do you smell a fault?").

Unlike most of Shakespeare's work, King Lear is one I know almost nothing about. I knew he wanted to divide his kingdom among his daughters, but that's pretty much it. So it'll be interesting to see how things turn out. And this being a tragedy, it won't end well, I'm sure.

¡Viva la revolución!

Just have a couple of quick notes before getting back to homework ...

I'm back in school, which has taken a worthwhile toll on my reading and blogging. But the term ends this month, and I have some interesting crime novels waiting for me: there's Scott Sparling's Wire to Wire, Marcus Sakey's The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, and Gillian Flynn's Dark Places. (I loved Flynn's Sharp Objects--you should read it.) I'm trying to get some fun reading done before next semester.

Here's a video of actors performing monologues from David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. (And speaking of Wallace, here's a blog described as "A Visual Exploration of the Filmography of James O. Incandenza and the World of David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest.'")

Have a good summer, kids.