January 22, 2004

Reading update

Dunno if anyone reads these or cares, but they're too much fine to write, so I continue.

Oroonoko got finished, like, a few days ago, and I finally got that crazy huge book out of my backpack so it can reside in a prominent place on my shelf. And by "prominent place" I mean that empty spot I finally found after much anguished searching. Oroonoko got a 56, which I generally classify as being right there on the fine line between a book that is merely fair, and one that is simply bad. In other words, a big, boring ho-hum. At best it was a fairly sordid little tale on a fairly common theme.

Boy meets girl, grandfather steals girl from boy, boy has sex with girl anyway, grandfather sells girl into slavery, boy goes off to war and feels better, boy captures many slaves in battle and gets tricked into slavery when trying to sell them, boy winds up on same plantation as girl, boy and girl live happily ever after . . . Until boy and girl decide that junior will not grow up as a slave, attempt to escape, fail, boy kills girl and unborn child to prevent recapture, boy is recaptured and has genitals, nose, ears, and arms cut off as he stoically smokes a pipe, and is finally killed. Yeah, there was more to it than that, but not very much more.

Plus, Aphra Behn had a number of very annoying writing habits, the worst of which was never using the word "them" and only using "'em" instead. That got old fast. And then there was the overall writing style, about which I have absolutely no complaints. It was very familiar, I've read numerous novels written in just the same way, I can deal with that. Decent writing with bad habits thrown in and a really crappy story . . . 56 is just about the best I can do for you. It does claim to be a true story, by the way, and I think it may be mostly or at least partially true, even though that was a very common claim to make about one's novel. This one actually has names, dates, and places that exist . . . which was not quite so common. (There is that annoying bad habit in other works, for instance those of Poe, of blanking out part of the date, or a pertinent name or location, to maintain the illusion of truth without saying something patently false.)

So, the five book cycle continues . . . when one goes out, another one flows in. With Oroonoko out of the way, I have begun Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, my most ambitious project to date. Previously that honor went to Les Miserables with its 1400+ page count (large pages, small print and margins, thick reading). Decline and Fall consists of three volumes, each approaching 1,000 pages. Don't expect a review of the entirety by next week, is what I'm telling you here. This could very well turn into a year-long thing, if I'm lucky enough to be that quick.

My lovely Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare finally arrived today, and I'll be diving back into that as soon as I finish another book, which will be soon. Also waiting in the wings . . . in fact, it just crashed right through the wings . . . Hold on. *backs up* I was planning on picking up All Hallow's Eve by Charles Williams as my next book, but it will now be the book after my next book, due to Dr. Batts pissing me off today in Shakespeare. The class as a whole was exruciatingly painful today, so I just haven't got the heart to go into full detail here. (For one thing, he spent ten minutes+ carefully explaining the difference between a playwright, a director, and an actor . . .) However, as he was explaining the disadvantages of drama as opposed to prose fiction, we were talking about the limited ability to get inside the character's head. As an example (we must back up everything with an example, or it won't stick) he cited the first part of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.

I haven't read it, or anything by Faulkner, although naturally I am familiar with it. I probably still wouldn't have said anything, read or not read, but that isn't the point. Our class was unfortunate enough to not have anyone who had read the thing. So we got berated for lacking in the area of "contemporary literary context" as if we should have known that one cannot study Shakespeare properly without having read Faulkner. I didn't take very kindly to this notion . . . at all. However, I decided that I'm tired of not having read anything by Faulkner anyway. I mean, he's one of the greats, and he's from the South. I should have picked him up years ago. If I really get into it, I'll drop everything else and complete it over the weekend, but that probably won't happen.

So, now we're finally actually reading Hamlet itself, although we're apparently reading it all outside of class, which upsets me to no end. That notwithstanding, we need to finish Act I by Friday (no problem, especially since he won't be there and we'll be watching a movie . . . there is a God) and Act II by Monday. Even though I have read Hamlet three times and studied it in all the usual ways, the cunning devil has still managed to create a worksheet that is going to give me fits. It has two columns at the top and the rest is totally blank. One column says: "Lines from Hamlet (write out lines and note Act, Scene, and line numbers)" and the other column says: "Speaker and Situation in which lines are spoken." And I had better be damn well certain that I pick the quotes that he would pick. I'm going to kill that man.

Posted by Jared at January 22, 2004 01:37 AM | TrackBack