Hey, I just met you... And this is crazy... But can I follow you to Phoenix when you abort our baby?

My second play for the summer is Phoenix by Scott Organ. 

I really enjoyed this one. It has a really great pace with two characters. They have a quick back and forth that is really easy to read and I bet it would be really great on stage with the right actors. I've seen two people plays before and Joe tells me they can be difficult to write but I thought this one was really great. I see why he chose it.

As my title gives away, Bruce follows Sue to Phoenix when she aborts their baby after a one night stand. And you'd think it would be fairly predictable from there. But it's not really. Both characters have surprises. Sue shows that not all women are obsessed with marriage and babies. And Bruce shows that not all men are afraid putting themselves out there. That's what I love about this play. Bruce points out that their situation is exactly a rarity in modern society. But it doesn't have to end with hurt feelings either. Sure, you could die in a car accident but that doesn't mean you stop driving, does it? If you let the feelings come naturally and are honest with yourself, something really awesome could come out of something really unpleasant. I don't read a lot of plays (besides Joe's work) so sometimes I had a little trouble deciding what tone the character was going for but there were only a few moments where I had to reread a couple of lines to see the shift in tone. If you're not interested in plays or you've been turned off because of being forced into Shakespeare, this is definitely a great play to get back into it.

Oh hey... Leonardo DiCarprio is in this book...

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is by far my favorite book we've read so far. I'm rather disappointed Joe found it inaccessible. I found it really easy to follow once you get past the wordiness of it.

I am so excited to see this on screen at the end of the year. I think it is really well cast and the story lends itself so well to a fast paced drama of the flapper era. The intriguing characters are both so complex and simple. They seem to have a lot going on on the surface but when you realized their motivations, its so simple. To paraphrase Jordan Baker at the first Gatsby summer party, busy characters are more intimate. You really get to know this group of characters well and I felt for their struggles. Their stories seem really deep but Fitzgerald does a great job of tying them all together. The only one I was really hoping for more from was Jordan Baker but I supposed because the narrator was half in love with her, it's easy to see why we don't get to know her better as Nick spends more time with Gatsby than Jordan.

I have to comment on the amazing love triangle going on here. Well, it's really more of a love polygon. I would have to guess that this is part of what trips people up when they say they don't like The Great Gatsby. What you have to remember though is all of the main 6 characters' motivations are tied back to this love polygon. I won't give you a full map of who loves whom and who is having an affair with whom but the way it all ties together is really great. It really adds to the intrigue of the story. As a modern reader, I could see how things should be but from a historical stand point, I can also see why they didn't work out. It was a really well written tangle of love. But don't expect smutty love scenes. Fitzgerald writes about evenings of wild parties and the privacy of large groups.

Once More Into the Breach

King Henry V
By William Shakespeare


You know all those conspiracy theories about William Shakespeare?  That he often stole his stories, or even that he didn't write all of his plays but took credit for other people's work?  After reading Henry V I kinda get it.  I've read a lot of Shakespeare's plays.  Ideally, I'll eventually read them all, but I'd say I've read about half at this point - mostly the comedies and tragedies, with only a few of the histories here and there.  Henry V is unlike any Shakespeare play I've ever read.  It's the first of his plays that I could possibly believe was written by someone else.  The language is very Shakespearean of course, and all the iambic pentameter fun is alive and well in this piece, but he's using elements that I've never seen in his other work.  He writes in different dialects (broken English and French) throughout the play, one of the characters has a sort of speech impediment where all of his Bs become Ps, and there are long exchanges of dialogue in French.  Obviously, the play is mostly set in France so the use of French makes sense, except that I've never seen it in another Shakespeare play.  And it's not like none of his other plays take place in other countries.  There's no Italian in Romeo and Juliet for example.

Now, maybe he felt comfortable using French here because as England's neighbor to the south, Shakespeare's audience could pick up a lot of the meaning in the French scenes.  I don't know.  I will say that I do like scenes in plays in unfamiliar languages.  That can be done very effectively, and there are a couple of instances here where I think it would be very effective on stage.  There's one entire scene in French, and while I think I'd enjoy watching it on stage and not knowing what was being said, just reading it, I do want to go and look up what that scene is about.  The other scene is where Henry is attempting to woo Katherine at the end of the play through the use of an interpreter and more broken English.

Overall, I really liked this play.  I've owned the film version with Kenneth Branagh for years but have never watched it, but now I will definitely have to.  I think Henry is an interesting character, being so passionate and quick to go to war in the beginning, but finding mercy through his success in battle.  It works well for me.

Is it a sin to kill a Mockingjay too?

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee


I am very familiar with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.  I've seen the movie a few times, and I was in a staged version of the story back in 2003, but I've never read the original novel.  First of all, I have to say that both of the adaptations that I've been exposed to are fantastic.  Obviously, the film is one of the best movies ever made, but it's also an incredibly good adaptation of the novel.  The play was a very different entity on its own; cutting out characters and introducing characters earlier in the story so that the actors weren't waiting around all night to have a couple of scenes.  I'm especially grateful of the playwright's choices because I played Bob Ewell, and if I had to wait for the court case to come on stage I would have gone out of my mind.  In the play, we see Ewell very briefly early on, and then he also shows up at the jailhouse to lynch Tom Robinson while Atticus is there standing guard.  This all worked out pretty well for me.

I imagine a lot of people are like this - when they read a book after seeing the movie, their brain plays out the scenes in their imagination using the actors from the movie.  I only bring it up because my brain had two casts to act out the scenes with.  I used actors from the movie a lot, but also the brilliant cast I performed the play with.  It got a little strange in my head at times but all worked out pretty well.

I think this is the best novel I've ever read.  Narrowly beating out The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers which is still the only book I've read that I haven't been able to put down.  While Mockingbird didn't have that particular effect on me, I think overall it's a better made novel.  I recently watched and reviewed a short PBS documentary on Harper Lee for my friend's website and in that video, one of the editors for Mockingbird talked about its early drafts, and how it felt like a very episodic collection of short stories.  The final draft definitely has that feeling too, with entire chapters feeling completely disconnected from the overall story, but this didn't bother me at all.  It struck me as a very "southern" approach to writing, like I was sitting on some old lady's porch on a summer evening while she told me stories from her life.  It was a very relaxing way to approach a novel.

I don't want to go on and on in this post, but I did want to write about one scene in particular that was cut out of both adaptations (at least, I think it was...).  In the book, Maycomb gets unseasonably cold one winter and they're hit with a huge snow storm.  With the snow piling up, everyone is cranking up their stoves and fireplaces to combat the cold.  In the middle of the night, one of the Finchs' neighbor's houses catches on fire, and the whole neighborhood has to pull together to rescue the elderly couple from their burning home.  I just found the juxtaposition between the ice cold and the burning heat so powerful and telling of the themes of the book, and then of course Boo Radley slips a blanket over Scout's shoulders to keep her warm in the snow and disappears just as quickly.  It's a really great moment because throughout the whole book, the reader is as excited to maybe get a glimpse of Boo as the kids are.

Hamlet's BFFs

Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard is the first play I read for our summer reading project. If you haven't read Shakespeare's Hamlet, go do that first. And if it's been five years, like it has for me, go read it again. I wish I had done that because I had a lot of questions while I was reading it.

In case you don't know, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Hamlet's friends. But they never appear in the original. So this story attempts to explain what they are doing during the drama with Hamlet and how they end up dead. If you don't like Shakespeare, you probably won't like this. Despite being written in 1966, Stoppard stays true to Hamlet with his use of Shakespearean language.

Roz and Guil spend the whole play confused. They don't remember where they came from and they don't understand their own deaths. To add to their confusion, and sometimes mine, random characters occasionally pop on stage to give cryptic speeches and disappear again. And all this confusion makes Roz and Guil indecisive. Even when they discover they are taking their friend to his death, they are unable to save him. For me it was all confusing. Roz's and Guil's stupidity seems unreal. They go to their deaths knowingly and willingly. And when they attempt to catch Hamlet hiding Polonius' body, they hold their belts out like a kid trying to catch the robbers in his house. It really is childlike they way they stumble along.

I think after watching the movie and possibly a second read, I'll like it a lot more. I am just so excited about some books coming up that I just wanted to get through this book.

Culture Shock Like Whoa

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden is the first book of Joe and my's original book list. Again, I'm not an English major or anything fancy like that so take my review as such...
Where my first read was short and sweet and took me two sittings to get through, Geisha took me a long time to finish up. Joe complains about how slow it is to get started but I actually really liked the back story of Chiyo. It gives you really great perspective to the choices she makes later in her life. I also think her sister's story would have no weight if you didn't get the full story of how they became to be sold into the geisha world.
The one thing that really gets me about this book is the culture shock. Being American, there was this amazing quality of unknown. Despite knowing she is a geisha in the end, I still found myself wondering what was going when Chiyo and her sister are taken from their hometown. The culture shock is apparent in every aspect of geisha life. I had absolutely no background knowledge of geisha. It made reading this book really fun because I had no expectations of what was to happen. Even with WWII happening in the middle, I still had no clue how would this would effect the geisha. And I love how "normal" some of the really unusual events feel. The explanation of how they sell their virginity seemed like a completely normal event despite the whole prostitution thing...
I need to get better about this writing thing. It's really hard to write critically about fiction. I'll get better, I promise.