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.

Stella!

The first play on the list I made for myself of plays I've never read but should is A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams.  If you googled lists of plays everyone should read, I'd bet Streetcar would be on most all of them, but for some reason it always slipped by me.  I'm not completely ignorant to Williams' work, but I might as well be.  The only thing I've read by Tennessee Williams is Glass Menagerie which is one of the best plays ever written, and I'd say definitely better than Streetcar but there's a lot of good stuff in this piece too.  I guess I just think Glass Menagerie has more interesting characters, more compelling relationships, and the story's more effectively constructed.

Streetcar Named Desire is about two sisters, Stella and Blanche, and Stella's husband Stanley.  Stanley's a drunk and a gambler and at his worst he can get really abusive.  Stella being the weak, submissive little girl she is can't bring herself to leave Stanley, but when Blanche comes into town, she ends up being a capable foil for Stanley.  This understandably drives Stanley to hate Blanche, and the longer she stays with the couple, the more Stanley is driven insane.

Honestly, through a lot of the reading of this, I couldn't help but picture The Simpsons' musical version of the play, where Marge plays Blanche and uses her fights with Homer to help her get into character.  Seriously, how good was The Simpsons before it got terrible?  Epic.

Anyway, Tennessee Williams is a master of realism, and maybe one of the best playwrights out there for creating rich and interesting characters.  Throughout the entirety of Streetcar all of the characters' actions feel completely grounded in reality; believable to where the character is at that specific moment in the play.

I put A Streetcar Named Desire on this list because I should have read it years ago, but I also wanted to read this play specifically because I'm going to be getting to the film version with Marlon Brando (Like I have to specify...) soon on my AFI Top 100 Blog.  So, keep a look out for my reactions to the film soon.

Companions, Whores, and Geisha

I was on the fence about whether or not to keep this blog, but let's face it, I do enjoy subjecting people to my thoughts about things I've read and seen, so here goes.  The first book on Jenn and my's summer reading list was Memoirs of a Geisha by some guy who was certainly never a geisha, but actually does an amazing job of creating a fictional story chronicling the life of a geisha in Japan in the years surrounding World War II.

Now, going into this book I had very little idea about what a geisha actually is.  I knew they were entertainers; dancing mostly, but had no idea that they are also engaged for long periods of time by men to keep as their mistress.  And yet, they're not prostitutes.  Sure, they sell their virginity to the highest bidder, and have affairs with married men in exchange for money and gifts, but they're not prostitutes.  Actually, they reminded me more of companions on Firefly, but with more makeup.  Obviously reading about another culture as an American can create some discomfort.  Whenever we're dealing with human trafficking, it's a dicey subject, even when it's voluntary and socially acceptable.

I did find myself wishing the story would progress faster.  Maybe it's my playwright mentality, but I think a story should start as late as possible and move efficiently through the characters' development.  Sometimes novels then feel long for the sake of being long.  However, Memoirs of a Geisha being a fake memoir has to adhere to those conventions and thus we need the whole story of Chiyo's life.  I guess it's just awkward to have so many chapters devoted to Chiyo's rebellious nature and other events preventing her from becoming a geisha because we know she's going to become one eventually.  This could have been fixed by just changing the title, but I assume they wanted to draw in an audience with the mysterious allure of geisha life.

Once Chiyo begins her serious training as a geisha, the story really takes off.  It's fascinating to get a realistic look at geisha culture while being presented with one of the most unique love stories you're ever likely to read about.  It's like Cinderella on steroids.  Scary, Japanese steroids...

If you've never seen the film version of Memoirs of a Geisha, you should know that it sucks.  A lot.  And I know everyone says that the book is always better, but I'm not everyone.  I like to appreciate a book and its film adaptation as separate entities, and not be bogged down by all the changes they made to the original story.  Changes have to be made.  Deal with it.  Memoirs of a Geisha is simply a terrible film.  Which I half expected, because there's nothing particularly cinematic about the book.  Mostly because it moves pretty slowly.  It works as a novel, letting the story unfold at a believable pace and not feel rushed, while the film version races through the plot.  I'm not sure it would be possible to create a good film version of Geisha but then again I think anything's possible.

The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.

Joe gave me a list of ten plays to read this summer and because I wanted to choose some readings for myself, I chose a list of three novels for each of us.  The first novel off my personal list is Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.  I should confess how I came to choose this as my first personal novel of the summer.  I had some time to kill while Joe was seeing Cabin in the Woods and I decided I could kill two hours easily by choosing my first book.  I only chose Of Mice and Men because it was only about 120 pages and I knew a lot of people had told me how great it was.  So if you read it for no other reason, read it because you can blow through it in an afternoon.

I feel it is necessary to touch on the theme of the American dream that runs through the novel.  I love that this is the first novel I've read that really comments on how impossible the American dream can be.  Lennie and George are making money working for others while trying to save to one day buy a piece of land and be self sufficient.  It seems impossible from the beginning. You just know that something else will get in their way of Lennie's rabbits and yet I still found myself hoping that they would find a way to make it happen.

There is something so beautiful about this novel yet so foreboding of a very dark ending.  I felt myself willing George to find another way but yet I knew that his choice was the most merciful for Lennie. I'm trying to write with the least number of spoilers as possible so if you haven't read it, just get it over with so you can appreciate what I'm saying.

I definitely don't have any major criticisms of the book.  I love how short it is and yet it doesn't feel rushed.  I've never tried to write a book review before and I'm sure Joe will give me some great feedback when he isn't geeking out at an Avengers movie marathon. So that's all I have for now.  I'm about finished with our first shared book so as soon as I finish that up, Joe and I will be writing our own reviews.

"I seen hundreds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads . . . every damn one of ’em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ’em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land."