Phew.  Nearly didn’t make it.  Actually I am not absolutely convinced I did make it – I was planning to read Daughters of the Sunstone (a trilogy) for the YA/juvenile fiction book of Jeane’s DogEar Reading Challenge; I thought it was juvenile fiction because when I looked it up in the library catalogue, it was shelved in the children’s section.  So when December rolled around I placed a hold on it (it was checked out), and I waited and waited and waited, and it never came in, and eventually I gave up and just checked out the first book of the trilogy, Darkchild.  I don’t know that I’d call it a kids’ book in real life, but on the other hand, I don’t want the challenge police to come and scold me, so a kids’ book it shall be called!

Darkchild is a sci-fi/fantasy book in which, essentially, humankind left earth eons ago and went to colonize other planets, making necessary changes to adapt to life on less friendly planets.  Brakrath, where our young heroine Khira lives, is one such planet – a planet on which the ruler can use the power of the sun as she wishes.  While spending a long winter alone, Khira meets a boy without a name, whom she calls Darkchild, unaware that he has been programmed (against his will, of course, or we wouldn’t like him) to collect information about her civilization, then bring it back to his programmers so they can use it to destroy the people of Brakrath and take all their valuable things.

What I loved about this book was the honesty of the characters’ dilemmas.  Even after she learns what Darkchild really is, Khira is fiercely loyal to him, desperate to find a way to save him from anyone that might consider harming or destroying him.  Darkchild, in his turn, grows fond of Khira and tries to fight against his programming, to access those parts of his memory that are shut off to him, and to keep his “guide” (the program in his head that protects him) in check.  Their loneliness aches, and it makes their relationship very sincere.

I wasn’t as crazy about the sci-fi business.  I am picky picky about my science fiction, and I found some of this confusing.  Some bits were over-explained, like the race of creatures who had programmed Darkchild (Darkchild has a revelation of sorts, near the end, where he remembers how he helped his programmers to destroy cultures that had helped him – and it falls flat because this has been explained so thoroughly in the rest of the book); and some were under-explained, like the powers the barohna (the rulers of the sunstone) has, and the way everyday life goes on this world.  I had a hard time getting a sense of the world, I guess, and that took me out of the book a bit.  Can’t have been too bad, though, as I’m eager to read the sequels if I can get them, and see where the author takes it from here.  I like it that she’s switching to different characters, as I do feel Khira and Darkchild are at a good stopping place.

Thanks to the lovely Jeane for hosting this challenge!  I’d say three of these five books were a bit out of my comfort zone, and that is a good thing for me to do, read outside of my usual stuff, give different things a try and see how I find them.  Like science fiction and books about food that make me want to eat cheese fries.

All these past weeks, when everyone has been deciding on their challenges for the New Year (is anyone else totally ready for 2010?  This has never happened to me before, but I find myself wanting to write 2010 as the year for everything, and then when I have to write 2009 instead, I feel cranky and cheated), I’ve been saying, I am not joining any.  No challenges for me, I have said.  I’m not joining the Women Unbound Challenge; I’m not joining Haloes and Horns, or Alyce’s Time Travel one, or the Graphic Novel one that Chris and Nymeth are hosting.

Though in fact this turns out to be a tangled web of lies.  I’m totally joining all these challenges, because, well, because they sound fun, and I like to find new blogs, and even when I pretend I’m not joining these challenges, I know that I really am.  Because I checked out The Facts in the Case of the Disappearance of Miss Finch, and I thought, Hey, for the graphic novel challenge! and then I checked out a graphic novel memoir of this woman whose husband was killed in 9/11, and I thought, this will work for the graphic novels one and maybe for the Women Unbound one too; and if I find a graphic novel about a time-traveling angel that deals with women’s issues, y’all, I’m going to throw a party.

Sidebar: Speaking of parties, a recent (-ly finished) study found that the happiest people in America are (drumroll!) Louisianians!  We’re the happiest state!  We’re happier than Hawaii!  It’s because we’ve got mad food here, and also because we like to throw parties.  Enormous festival-type parties for rice and jazz and strawberries and football and hurricanes.  PARTY AT LOUISIANA’S HOUSE.

Anyway, pride in my home state aside, here they are, the challenges that I am joining for the new year:

The Women Unbound Challenge is happening here, and I am joining it a bit late, and I am joining at the suffragette level, which means reading eight books all about the womenfolk before November of next year (I can totally do that!).  This is a list of some books I am considering:

Women of the Raj, Margaret MacMillan – I’ve had this on my shelves for a while – it’s about women!  Of the Raj!
The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy – a novel set in the 1950s that follows a wacky ex-pat girl in Paris
The Group, Mary McCarthy – apparently this is Sex and the City for 1930s Vassar graduate ladies
Sisters, John Fialka – a nonfiction book about how nuns have contributed to the making of America
Bluestockings, Jane Robinson – a nonfiction book I probably won’t be able to acquire, about the first wave of women who went to university but I probably won’t be able to get it (sad, sad, sad)
Foreign Correspondence, Geraldine Brooks – a memoir about Geraldine Brooks tracking down all her old pen friends
Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy – nonfiction book about women and feminism in America right now
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte – because my sister said Anne Bronte is sort of a badass feminist

Those are the ones I’m thinking of right now.  However, there are a lot of people in the blogosphere with lists of books they are reading for this challenge, and I may read a completely different set of books than these.

Time Travel Reading Challenge!  Because I love time travel!  And because it’s completely relaxing – I get to pick the number of books to read and read them sometime in 2010.  I’m going to read five.  Five is a nice number.  I was born in the fifth month.  These are the ones I want to read, though at least one of these is a bit of a pipe-dream.

Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, Samuel Madden – I was enchanted by the idea of this book to start with, because it’s got an angel in it (see below!) what travels to 1728 (which is about when the book was written) with letters from 1997/1998, and apparently it was terribly controversial at the time and it got suppressed.  Going to have to ILL this one.
Trapped in Time, Ruth Chew – Two little kids get transported back to the Civil War times
A Traveler in Time, Alison Uttley – A time travel book written by the lady who wrote Little Grey Rabbit.  Love.
Time Cat, Lloyd Alexander – Well, just because I haven’t read this book in a thousand years, and I used to love it.
Making History, Stephen Fry – a book about people trying to stop Hitler from being born – Stephen Fry wrote it!  Stephen Fry.  I love Stephen Fry and am curious about his writing

Also, the Horns and Halos Challenge, which I simply can’t resist.  It’s devils and angels!  How fun, right?

There are several reasons this challenge appeals to me.  One is that my fluttering heart, who is hosting it, is hosting it because she’s tired of vampires AND, GOD, SO AM I. Another is that I have never reviewed Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel Murder Mysteries on this blog, despite its containing one of my favorite ever lines in all of literature.  And another is that I want to reread Paradise Lost.  I’m going to read seven books, because my birthday is on the seventh of the month.  And I like the number  seven, and it is all mystical which is good as it’s angels and demons.  I counted it out carefully, and with my choices of books, I am going to end up on the Garden of Eden level, exactly the same amount angels and devils, assuming Paradise Lost splits up the middle.

Paradise Lost, John Milton
Murder Mysteries, Neil Gaiman – a graphic novel with angels and murder mysteries
Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, Samuel Madden – see above!  An angel and time travel!
The Vintner’s Luck, Elizabeth Knox – a vintner and an angel become friends and stay friends over many years
Lucifer, Mike Carey – a series of graphic novels that I’ve been meaning to read anyway because I liked Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer
Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe – because I never did read it before and have heard wonderful things about it
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, Jonathan L. Howard – all about a guy who sold his soul to learn necromancy

And last, but not least of course, Chris and Nymeth’s Graphic Novels Challenge.

Graphic novels!  I enjoy graphic novels!  I shall read numerous graphic novels!  I shall be at the Expert level, which is ten or more.  I’m not making a list right now because it’s always iffy whether my library will have any of the graphic novels I want; so these decisions will have a lot to do with what’s available.  (My library is wonderful, and is getting more graphic novels than they used to have, but they still don’t have a really fantastic collection.)

I have this strategy – I’ve mentioned it before – where when I really like an author, I save some of their books.  I haven’t read two (2) of Salman Rushdie’s books.  Martin Millar has written a number of books that I haven’t read, and I haven’t made the small effort it would take to order them used online.  This is not because of any shortage of love in my heart for Martin Millar’s books.  It’s because I’m saving them.  I do it with rereads too.  It’s been at least five years since I last read Persuasion, although (well, actually it’s because) I love Jane Austen, and I like to give myself a little treat every few years.

I haven’t read Mary Renault’s Theseus books in several years.  I haven’t read The Last of the Wine since high school.  And I have never ever read The Praise Singer, and until today I had never read The Mask of Apollo.  I read this book all over the place yesterday and today, and I did it at my parents’ house where (you may have heard) there is also a tiny little puppy who likes to snuggle on laps, chew on curtains, and wrestle with a stuffed koala bear.  Because The Mask of Apollo is so good it’s sick.

The book is about an Athenian actor, Nikeratos, who lives in Greece after the Peloponnesian War.  After a particularly magnificent performance as Apollo, he meets Dion of Syracuse as well as Dion’s close friend, the philosopher Plato.  Thereafter Niko becomes involved in Dion’s political intrigues as he (Dion, not Niko) works in Syracuse to establish the perfect philosopher-state as envisioned by Plato.  This doesn’t work out as fantastically well as you might think, though Mary Renault seems very definitely to think it could have gone better if Alexander the Great, rather than Dionysius II, had been in charge of Syracuse at the time.  (Alexander makes an appearance at the end of the book, and it was like seeing an old friend.  I love Mary Renault’s Alexander books, because nobody has ever loved a protagonist, and I am including Dorothy Sayers and Peter Wimsey, the way that Mary Renault loves her Alexander the Great.)

I’m a little sad that I’ve now read this book.  I’ve read it, and it’s read, and I can’t ever read it for the first time again.  I loved all the stuff about ancient Greek theatre – Niko speaks about how the actors interacted with each other, how the scenery worked, and the special effects, how the audiences responded.  Mary Renault writes beautiful characters, brave and flawed and frightened – you can see that she loves them, the ones she’s made up, but especially the ones she’s found in history.  I also now know a whole lot of things about Dionysius II that I never knew before.

A scene I like – I remember my mother showed me this scene when I was younger, long before I’d read any Mary Renault books in full.  Niko is not quite seven, playing little Astyanax in Euripides’s Women of Troy:

All I remember for certain is my swelling throat, and the horror that came over me when I knew I was going to cry.  My eyes were burning.  Terror was added to my grief.  I was going to wreck the play…Tears burst from my shut eyes; my nose was running.  I hoped I might die, that the earth would open or the skene catch fire before I sobbed aloud.

The hands that had traced my painted wounds lifted my gently.  I was gathered into the arms of Hecuba; the wrinkled mask with its down-turned mouth bent close above.  The flute, which had been moaning softly through the speech, getting a cue, wailed louder.  Under its sound, Queen Hecuba whispered in my ear, “Be quiet, you little bastard.  You’re dead.”

I also loved how Niko casts everything in theatre terms.  It’s not obnoxious, though it could easily be – yes, we get it, Greek politics are like the theatre – but Niko is wry and a little detached, and it seems natural.  This I liked, when he’s speaking with one of Plato’s students, a woman called Axiothea:

“The philosopher is the pilot.  He knows where the harbor is, and the reef; he knows the constant stars.  But men still pursue illusions.  Their prejudice will not be broken till such a man takes the helm and shows them.  Once he has saved them from the rocks, that will be the end of guesswork.  No man will drown if he sees the remedy, will he?”

She paused for a feed-line, as philosophers do – just like comic actors, though one must not say so.

Other bits I liked:

“A man more precious than empires, both to us and to men still unborn, with who knows what wisdom yet undistilled in him.  He is clear of all misjudgement, except his faith in me.  He had not seen Syracuse for twenty years; Dionysos he had known only as a child who rode upon my shoulder.  For no living man but me would he have gone again to Sicily.  And I sent for him – for this very thing which has made and broken all: his charm that can make discourse beautiful and catch the soul through the heart.  Was Oidipos himself more blind?”

And:

There’s always one more war to win, or one more election, before the good life; meantime they wrangle about the good, those who still believe in it.  So we dream.  Of what?  Some man sent by the gods, first to make us believe in something, if only in him, and then to lead us.  That is it.  We have dreamed a king.

I will now stop raving over Mary Renault.  I love her.  This book was wonderful and I love her.  Internet, read more Mary Renault!  I love her!  I am giving this book five shiny sparkly stars, and I feel like I want to go read every surviving ancient Greek play right now and imagine Niko playing the roles.

In 1935, a mother wrote in to a British motherhood magazine saying this:

Can any mother help me?  I live a very lonely life as I have no near neighbors.  I cannot afford to buy a wireless. I adore reading, but with no library am very limited with books.  I dislike needlework, though I have a lot to do!  I get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I am alone in the house….Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude ‘thinking’ and cost nothing?

In response, a group of women formed a privatecorrespondence magazine.  They submitted articles about their lives; the articles were bound into a magazine and sent around to each woman in turn.  They wrote comments on each other’s articles, offering advice and support.  The correspondence magazine lasted for over 50 years and was a lifeline to the women involved.  Can Any Mother Help Me? excerpts articles the women wrote about their children, the war, family sickness, marital problems, etc.

The book was fascinating – it reminded me so much of blogging!  The women who participated in the magazine would put in little notes on the articles, “love what you have written!”, etc.  Before each excerpt, Jenna Bailey included a biography of the woman who wrote it, to put the articles in the broader context of the author’s life.  Although there isn’t enough room in the book to give a lot of information about each woman, their descriptions of their lives are still vivid and individual.  I liked Yonire and Accidia the best as writers, but I enjoyed many of the stories.

If I were doing the Women Unbound Challenge – which I am not, I swear I can resist the temptation to enter these things because I have no idea whether I will be able to finish them – but if I were, I’d include this book as part of it, because, you know.  Hooray for women supporting each other!  (Thanks to Tara for the recommendation.)

This review seems a smidge perfunctory, but that is only because I am currently in the middle of The Mask of Apollo, a book by Mary Renault that I have been saving and saving for many years and finally decided to read and it is wonderful.  I wish I could travel back in time and give Mary Renault a hug.  Should be finished with it soon though my review may be delayed as my little sister just got back into town and we have A LOT of stuff to catch up on, like going to the mall and trying on prom dresses, and talking about who we would cast in the movie versions of every book we have read since we last saw each other, and eating Mexican food and going out for cheese fries, and watching Doctor Who and Angel and Better Off Ted – y’all, there are many things we are going to do.

In other happy news, my parents got a puppy.  She is the sweetest little puppy, though I am glad I am grown-up and not at home and thus no longer responsible for cleaning up after a brand new puppy, or for puppy-proofing all my things.  I named her Jasmine (Jazz for short!), and her proper name is Jasmine Mouton because she looks like a little sheep when she romps all over the house.  Of course, after we had already agreed on the name, I discovered she was born on Oscar Wilde’s birthday.  BORN ON OSCAR WILDE’S BIRTHDAY Y’ALL.  If I had known this, I would have pushed to name her Ada Leverson.  Ada Leverson Puppy.

See that koala bear in the corner?  Jasmine loves it.  We caught it at a St. Patrick’s Day parade a few years ago, I believe, and it is nearly as big as she is, but she still carries it all around and worries at it and tries to rip its ears off.  I think that means affection, from a puppy?  Anyway she is extremely sweet and seems very, very clever.  She is already starting to head for the back door when she needs to go out, though of course once she is out, all she wants to do is to chew on the air conditioning and run under the house.  We hope she grows too tall for under the house VERY SOON.

Ruth Thomas lives on Fort Niles, an island off the coast of Maine, where the main occupation is lobster-hunting.  Raised mainly on Fort Niles by her father and her neighbor Mrs. Pommeroy, Ruth’s upbringing is punctuated with time spent in Delaware boarding school.  Upon her graduation she returns to Fort Niles determined to start a life there, despite the apparent wishes of her mother’s family, the posh Ellises who only summer in Fort Niles.

I liked Eat Pray Love – not unreservedly, but a lot.  I liked it when God told her to go back to bed, and I cried when the medicine man remembered her.  (I don’t know why that made me cry but it did.)  I thought Elizabeth Gilbert wrote most beautifully.  When I started Stern Men, I truly expected not to like it, and I was surprised to find it engaging as well as well-written.  I don’t know why I was surprised!  I liked Eat Pray Love!  In Stern Men, Elizabeth Gilbert creates vivid characters and then makes incisive observation after incisive observation about them.

As I got further and further through the book, though, I was increasingly bothered by the shortage of plot.  So yeah, Ruth loves Mrs. Pommeroy; she finds her china-shop mother and the Ellis family difficult; she is attracted to Owney Wishnell of the Wishnell Lobster Dynasty.  This went along, not exactly in circles, but it went around a little bit, interspersed with backstory.  A lot of backstory happened, backstory on Ruth’s parents, on Fort Niles and its lobster wars with the nearby Courne Haven Island.  It felt like adding texture to the story, but then suddenly at the end, every piece of backstory and every piece of normal story got resolved lickety-split in a tidy little bow.

Aggravating.  There is a part of me that loves a happy, tidy ending.  It’s a big part.  I want everyone to live happily ever after.  But most of me finds it frustrating.  Life is not tidy!  That’s why it’s interesting.  I like me an ambiguous ending, that suggests the possibilities of happiness and pain – I always assume it’s happiness (that happy ending part of me!), but at least the writer’s not pretending pain’s not one of the options.

So here’s what I am wondering – what does an ending need to resolve?  I don’t like a book that just stops, but I also don’t like it to take every single element of the plot and tie them all up together.  How much resolution has to happen?

We had a sad end of Thanksgiving – my family dog died quite suddenly on Sunday.  She was a lovely dog, really just the best dog you ever met.  We got her when I was eleven, and she was three months old and very fluffy.  For the longest time we couldn’t think what to call her – we called her Porcupine as a placeholder nickname, and my mother finally came up with Nora.  Nora was extraordinarily beautiful if difficult to capture in photographs (but here’s a picture of her anyway), and even when she was an old dowager dog, she still mostly acted like a scampery playful puppy.  We are rather forlorn without her.

***

My sister says it is funny to behold me when I am ill (because I rarely am).  She says I get all What is this uncomfortable feeling I am feeling, this unpleasant pain-like experience that is happening to me?  I do not recognize it but I am confident I do not like it.  So when I get allergies, WHICH ARE NOT A REAL SICKNESS BUT JUST MY IMMUNE SYSTEM ACTING A FOOL, I feel extraordinarily resentful.  I have had allergies the past few days, peaking on Saturday, and these are the strategies I have tried to get rid of them:

1. Complaining really loudly to myself in my apartment as I fling Kleenex in the direction of the trash bins (“UNHAPPY.  UNHAPPY.  UNHAPPY.”)
2. Implementing the same basic trouble-shooting process I use with crying babies; which is to say, I fed me, wrapped me up in blankets, gave me toys to play with (books and then cross-stitching and West Wing), and finally as a last resort put me down for a nap.
3. Taking very small doses of Benadryl.  Bigger doses make me unfit to drive.
4. Acquiring local honey and putting it in my coffee.  Remember how I said I hate honey? (And honey mustard and honey in tea and honey baked ham/turkey/chicken and anything with honey.)  I hate allergies more.  Local honey cures allergies and I will have it in my coffee or spread on bread or in my ramen noodles or anything as long as it gets rid of my allergies.
5. Ordering my immune system to knock it off (“There is nothing wrong!  You lymphowhateverthings that fancy yourselves Paul Revere can go back inside!  Save it for an actual germ, my God!”).  I know, it’s pretty cutting, and may hurt my immune system’s feelings.  But I think when my immune system goes on red alert in reaction to blooming ligustrum (that’s privet to our neighbors across the pond) or cane burning or whatever, it has earned a sharp reproof.

***

TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:

A while ago, I bought an unreasonable number of books at our university’s book bazaar.  I took that entire day off work just to buy that unreasonable number of books, the first day I had taken off work in five months.  And of all the books I bought that I hadn’t read before, I have only since then read one of them.  And I didn’t think much of it.

I find it strange that the book I picked to read was Elizabeth Gilbert’s Stern Men, all about lobster fishing, a subject that holds little to no interest to me.  I believe I was thinking I would start it, get bored, and post it on PaperbackSwap, and the whole process would feel cleansing.  But so far it is quite enjoyable, and so for Teaser Tuesdays I say unto you:

Why was her mother such a china shop in the first place?…Ruth was used to women like the Pommeroy sisters, who strode through life as though they were invincible.

I have been hearing about this book all over.  The first line is captivating: “After she threw the baby in, nobody believed me for the longest time.  But I kept hearing that splash.”  So I decided to read it even though it is several things I tend not to like: a Southern novel, set in the Depression, and featuring The Mines.  My final opinion is, The Well and the Mine is quite good for a Southern Depression Mines novel, which – it confirmed once more for me – is just not the best kind of book for me.

Nine-year-old Tess is outside daydreaming near her family’s well, when she sees a woman throw a baby into the well.  She struggles with this memory, trying to work out who the woman could have been, with the help of her older sister Virgie.  Her father and mother are meanwhile doing their best in a town beset with the financial and racial problems of the Great Depression.

I liked it that the baby-in-well plotline provided a framework for the book without being the central concern of all the characters all the time.  In the midst of the Great Depression, Tess’s parents have other things to worry about than someone else’s now-over difficulties with a now-dead baby.  The baby in the well frames the story, in terms of plot as well as theme.  The Well and the Mine is about people coping with impossible situations to the best of their abilities.  Tess’s family, the Moores, are Good People, and most of the characters in the book are – in varying degrees – Good People.  People who try, people who help each other.  I liked all this.

(I keep writing The Gin and the Mine and The Well and the Gin.  Dammit.)

The story is told from the points of view of Tess and Virgie, and their parents Leta and Albert.  The younger brother, Jack, also gets to narrate sections of the story, but he speaks as an adult looking back on what happened.  This could easily have had the effect of yanking the reader out of the story, but instead it just gave perspective to the whole thing, a sense that their present difficulties would pass (or not pass).  The multiple perspectives thing was interesting insofar as I like knowing what’s occupying each of the characters, but their voices are not distinct, and that made it not work so well for me.

As I say – mainly it was good.  I just don’t like this kind of book.  Is there a genre or subject matter that puts you off a book?

Other reviews: Paperback Reader, Books and Cooks, Educating Petunia, Thoughts of Joy, Leafing Through Life, Semicolon, Five Borough Book Review, The B Files, and possibly others, so let me know if I missed yours!

So this is my adult fantasy or science fiction book for Jeane’s DogEar Challenge, and I have managed to finish it before the end of November, which I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do, what with all the applying to grad school I’ve been doing and whatnot.  Chalice!

I have figured out the key to Robin McKinley, and I will tell you what it is.  In each of her books, she has a world that she’s created, and she plops you down right in the middle of the world.  By and large, her books are not enormously long on plot, and this is fine as long as you think her world is interesting, and you continue to think it’s interesting.  Dragonhaven, I did not enjoy.  I have never been a big fan of dragons anyway.  But Sunshine, now – the world of Sunshine was all desserts and shiny sharp edges.  When plot wasn’t happening, I was happy just wandering around in Sunshine’s world.

I do not like honey.  Because it’s sticky, and I am tactile-defensive.  I don’t like sticky things or greasy things – when it comes time to clean a butter dish, I’d just as soon buy a new butter dish.  If there were honey dishes, I’d have the same issue.  I’m shuddering thinking about cleaning a honey dish.  Chalice came out ages ago, and I never read it because I don’t like honey.

Chalice is about a girl called Marisol with bees who makes honey.  Following a cataclysmic event that leaves the current Master of the land and his second-in-command, the Chalice, dead, Marisol is chosen by the earthlines as the new Chalice.  Uncertain of herself, trying to teach herself all the rituals she needs to know as Chalice, she is put further off balance when the new Master is named.  Brother of the old Master, he was sent to the priests of Fire, and after seven years is no longer quite human.

Overall, it was better than Dragonhaven, not quite as good as Deerskin, and not within miles of Beauty or Sunshine.  The world was interesting, with the rituals and the magic, but the characters didn’t have much to do throughout the book, up until the anticlimactic, rather too tidy final conflict scene.  If I had to put my finger on a problem, I’d say it was that Marisol was too isolated for too much of the book.  Not just that she had very few allies, but that she had very few interactions with anyone at all, and that made her difficult to know.

I am very full of food right now.

Here is what other people thought, and if I missed your link tell me! and I will add it:

DogEar Diary
Angieville
Em’s Bookshelf
Charlotte’s Library
bookshelves of doom
Once Upon a Bookshelf
Andrea’s Book Nook

I know this is the second time I’ve mentioned Aaron Sorkin in the past few days, but that’s only because I’m rewarding myself for applying to grad school by letting myself watch episodes of Sports Night and The West Wing.  Anyway, I’m watching Sports Night and this is the dialogue that just went by:

Jeremy: This, you’re gonna love!  This is maybe the most important piece of boxing writing ever done.
Casey: And what with all the important pieces of boxing writing to choose from–
Jeremy: The Marquis of Queensberry Rules…written by?
Casey: The Marquis of Queensberry?
Jeremy: No, boxing boy.  John Graham Chambers.
Casey: Then why’s it called the Marquis of Queensberry Rules?
Jeremy: It’s a mystery.
Dan: That’ll keep me up at night.

And then they let it go, though if you have watched even one episode of any show written by Aaron Sorkin you will be aware that letting things go is not the forte of his characters.  This they let go, and at no point in the episode did anyone bring it back up.  You know why?  Because the Marquess of Queensberry after whom the names are ruled (because he said they were good – hardly seems fair to poor John Graham Chambers, but I don’t care because boxing freaks me out) was complete crap.  Not worth bringing back up.

Is it vindictive of me to a) be this pleased that even Aaron Sorkin couldn’t be bothered to look up Marquess of Queensberry and his connection with the rules; and b) take the time to write a blog post about it, even though c) the Marquess of Queensberry has been dead for over a century?  I – okay, yeah.  Maybe.  On the other hand, he was a great big jerk.  Did I tell you – BECAUSE I AM ABOUT TO TELL YOU – did I tell you about the time that he went to the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest with a bunch of (seriously) yucky rotten vegetables?  And do you know that he not only cheated on his wife, not a bit discreetly, he also brought his mistresses back to the family home and made his wife entertain them?  He was awful.  He was awful in many, many different ways, and the fact that he persecuted Oscar Wilde and ruined his life is just one of several reasons (okay, the main reason) that I do not like him.

I’m sorry this blog post is slightly vindictive.

Sometimes I am slightly vindictive about people who acted like a jerk to Oscar Wilde.

Like every time I find myself in the poetry section of a bookshop, I just glance over to see if they have any books of poetry by Lord Alfred Douglas.  And they never do.  And then I look to see whether they have any books of poetry by poets that Lord Alfred Douglas thought he was better than, like W.H. Auden and Percy Bysshe Shelley and T.S. Eliot.  Just about always, they have all books of poetry by all three of these gentlemen.  And then I have a smug vindictive internal giggle.  If you are ever with me in the poetry section of a bookshop, and I am looking pleased, ask me if I am thinking of Lord Alfred Douglas.  I don’t hate your odds of being right in that case.

Here’s what you should understand before reading Comedy of Errors.  My boy Shakespeare, he’s funny.  He’s all about being funny; he’s got funny down pat.  If you don’t believe me, I can only assume that it’s because you have never seen one of Shakespeare’s plays performed by actors with any hint of comedic timing.  He can do it in many different ways – he can do slapsticky visual gags, he can do puns, he can do wry little digs and situational irony and gallows humor.

And when he’s not being funny, he’s still being clever.  Nearly always!  He makes his words work hard for their money – if a word has a double meaning, Shakespeare will not let it pass unnoticed.  If two people are arguing, they’re not doing a half-assed job of it.  Read Richard III and you will find that Shakespeare could already, at the age of 27, crank out some whip-smart stichomythia that would make Aaron Sorkin cry like a little girl.

By the way, I just sat here for ten minutes conducting major excavations in my memory for the word stichomythia, and I eventually dug it out without the aid of the internet, and I am rather proud of that fact.  I took eight years of Latin and majored in English literature, and the result is that I have lots of dorky love for literary devices.  Like litotes?  I am not unfond of litotes (see what I did there?).  Cicero used them to great effect in his First Catilinarian Oration.  I like zeugma too because the word sounds exactly like the sound Ad-Aware makes when it’s finished finding bad files on your computer.  Chiasmus and transferred epithet and ascending tricolon, each in its own particular way is dear to my heart; and though it caused me some difficulties in Latin translations, I admire the elegance of periodic structure.

But back to Comedy of Errors.  It is not wholly without merit.  It has many funny lines; the two Dromios and the two Antipholuses get a couple of good riffs going between them.  The reason I have just spent some time defending Shakespeare and his ability to write comedy is that Errors is not his finest hour, plotwise.  It’s about two sets of twins (a set of master twins called Antipholus and a set of servant twins called Dromio) who were separated in a shipwreck, and as coincidence would have it, one of each set took his twin’s name as an homage.  Now the set that lived in Syracuse has come to Ephesus (risking death, because nobody from Ephesus can visit Syracuse and vice versa).  People in Ephesus get the twins mixed up.  That’s the whole plot.  It gets old after a while.  Mistaken identity humor is the kind of humor that’s difficult to sustain.  I am interested to inspect the ways in which Shakespeare manages his mistaken identity humor over the years.

Seriously, though.  I cannot wait for Twelfth Night.  That whole thing with Malvolio?  CLASSIC.  Do you have a favorite Shakespeare comedy moment?