Okay, so some books are a quicker read than others, sometimes life, children and work get in the way of reading and finishing a book. Half-terms always seem like a good time to catch up on that eternal TBR pile … but then life intervenes and you end up standing in a river in glorious…
Tag: Shakespeare
Roof Toppers, Katherine Rundell
It’s that time of year again: the Carnegie Medal Shortlist is announced! Much joy! Genuine excitement! Much fretting over how to juggle reading the Shortlist with doing work, marking, planning … and, this year, entertaining the baby! And Roof Toppers was a lovely way to start the Shortlist … Which I finished today by reading…
Intertextuality in the The Woman in Black
Intertextuality is a strange idea. It’s reasonable and intuitive that texts refer both backwards and forwards within themselves: how many stories and tales begin and end at the same place and setting? Detective fiction is built on the importance of small early details turning into clues to be resolved later. Anton Chekov went so far…
The Shakespeare Curse, J. L. Carrell
The last book I read, The Passage by Justin Cronin, took me a month to read. This book, The Shakespeare Curse, took me 72 hours. That’s not a good sign. Not good at all. I like to lose myself in a book, to live, breathe, love and bleed with the characters I share my reading…
The Passage, Justin Cronin
Horror is not usually my thing at all. I don’t like blood. I get bored by violence. I get worried by crime writing’s increasing interest in hugely violent bloodied crime scenes and the minutiae of destruction that can be inflicted on the human (and usually female) form. So it was with some misgivings that I…
Hamlet and Women, discussion
Hamlet, perhaps the most famous and most argued over play by Shakespeare, was written between the years 1599 and 1601 as Elizabeth I was reaching the end of her reign. The play features two of the most famous women in Shakespeare: Ophelia and Gertrude and Hamlet’s relationships with these women account for a large number…
Anthony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare
Absolutely sublime play. Re-reading it after many many years and still bowled over. A GCSE set text; an integral part of Degree level “tragedy” unit (other people got to play with dead bodies, I learned how to be miserable: thanks Cambridge!!); and a vital part of my make up! As I write, please near in…
