#and in the meantime we have the kickass plot of 'hero is turned into villain and must remember who they are'

[inhalingwords]

Monthly Wrap Up || October 2017

Henry IV, Part 2 by William Shakespeare || Henry V by William Shakespeare || The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare || A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare || Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare || As You Like It by William Shakespeare || Hamlet by William Shakespeare || Instrucciones para salvar el mundo by Rosa Montero || Kudottujen kujien kaupunki by Emmi Itäranta || Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay by Annie Proux, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana || Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë || The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale retold by Jeanette Winterson || Puhdistus by Sofi Oksanen

Henry IV, Part 2 by William Shakespeare

Disease, darkness, decay. 2 Henry IV is a sequel and it shows tbh. It’s boring, Prince Hal is obnoxious, there is not a thing in this play I much care for. The prologue is alright.

Henry V by William Shakespeare

Henry V continues and -- thankfully -- ends the story in the Henriad. Like 2 Henry IV, I didn’t enjoy this one either. I mean, it’s a fine play (and tetralogy) about war, kingship, honour, patriotism, etc., except that that’s precisely the problem. All of that presented as it is in the play(s) is directly opposite to my own values and morals. I don’t think it’s honourable that king Henry V wants to wage war with France only because of some titles and dukedoms to add to his name/”imperium” (+ to distract the populace with external unrest away from civil unrest) or that he threatens French towns with rape and pillaging if they don’t let them in so he can have them surrender “peacefully”, and that’s all supposed to make him out to be this great, amazing king because “band of brothers! we happy few! he totally gets down with the lowly commoners! wooo”, like, no thanks.

The entire concept of these plays is to bump up English/British nationalism/patriotism and be a reminder of these “”””glorious””” things done in the past “under God’s will”. lmao. It’s jingoistic propaganda and that doesn’t interest me.

The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare

Now, The Winter’s Tale is a severely underappreciated Shakespeare play imo. There are not sufficient words to explain how much I loved reading this play!

The Winter’s Tale is a lovely tragedy-that-turns-to-comedy about jealousy, family, time, redemption, rebirth, healing, and hope in the middle of darkness. There are some real kickass female characters (Pauline! what a woman! i love her! and Hermione, who is Great™), one of the most famous stage directions of all time (”Exit, pursued by a bear”), queer subtext, cute romance, and one of the most beautiful scenes in Shakespeare (that last scene with the “statue” Hermione, damn!).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

This was actually my second reread of this play this year, I already reread it back in March. But because I recently bought the beautiful Arden edition of the play, I just needed to reread it once more. And I’m glad! This is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays (hence why I bought the separate edition). I love the whimsy, the fairies, and the aesthetic, but I also really appreciate the plot, the running away into the woods and all the love-magic shenanigans.

I greatly enjoyed the Third Series Arden edition’s emphasis on the theatrical staging history across the world. It was very interesting to read about (also: wtf I didn’t know there’s a history of female!Oberons, that’s my new favourite interpretations at the mo, so yess, thanks). The entire Introduction was top-notch and I found much to think about; my favourite things is how the play has very much a dreamlike quality with many alarming things bubbling underneath the surface that are never quite brought into focus and problematised.

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Holy moral ambiguity and manipulation, y’all! There’s no clear villain in this play, everyone’s a bit sketchy, and the central theme is of political rivalry and machinations. My favourite thing about Julius Caesar (and other plays like this) are the many layers, like when you consider the historical time depicted in the play, the context of Shakespeare’s time when the play was written in, and also the context of present time when I myself am reading this play. 

I ended up liking this play much more than I expected to, and I’m looking forward to reading it again in the future (and seeing some great adaptations in the meantime!).

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

As You Like It is a wonderful pastoral (romantic) comedy that both brings the pastoral to life and parodies/critiques it. It’s absolutely charming and also very queer (thereby claiming it’s place on my list of fave Shakespeare plays pretty much automatically). It’s also the play with the female character who has the most lines out of all Shakespeare’s female characters (woop!). The characters are what really make this play for me: Rosalind, Celia, Orlando, Jaques, I love them so much, and I might even go so far as to say I even enjoy Touchstone.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

I have to admit: this was my first time reading Hamlet, I haven’t seen a movie or stage adaptation of it, and, going into the play, I only had a very general idea what it was about (along the lines of “there’s a Danish prince called Hamlet, it’s a tragedy, people die”) and I knew a handful of quotes out of context.

That said, like for many others, my experience of reading Hamlet was that of recognition. I kept encountering quotes I knew and it proved super interesting to finally get the full context for them. I find Hamlet an intriguing play, (especially philosophically, psychologically and metatheatrically speaking) and I’m looking forward to seeing some stage/movie adaptations of it.

Instrucciones para salvar el mundo by Rosa Montero

Instrucciones para salvar el mundo is a milestone book for me: it’s the first book I’ve ever read in Spanish. Sadly, I can’t whole-heartedly recommend it for others. I like it... I think??

The problem I have with the book isn’t that it’s bad, it’s that I feel like I really love the theme and the central concept of the book so much -- there’s beauty in life, sometimes you don’t even realise how privileged you are and how much you have, how much life in itself is worth until you’re staring death in the face, that these darkness in the world but also so much goodness and beauty and happiness -- BUT something about the execution was just lacking. The characters felt a little bit too much like stereotypes (the two boring white male protags, one of whose wife is death so he’s grieving and the other who is cheating on his wife; the black sex worker who is Good and needs to be helped; the Moroccan suicide bomber, etc.). I did like two of the female characters (Cerebro, an old scientist, and Fatma, the sex worker) but they were more peripheral characters, just passing through the bigger plot of the two dudes, one of whom was so obnoxious I nearly put the book down because of him.

So, yeah. The book is good but not awesome, and I feel a bit let down.

Kudottujen kujien kaupunki by Emmi Itäranta

Kudottujen kujien kaupunki (UK: The City of the Woven Streets, US: The Weaver) is easily my favourite book of the month.

Earlier this year, in April, I read Itäranta’s first book Teemestarin kirja (engl. Memory of Water), which I loved, so I was expecting to like Kudottujen kujien kaupunki, and it honestly still managed to blow me away and even exceed my expectations. Once again, there’s a dystopian setting, environmental themes (this time, water pollution), beautiful writing, and fascinating worldbuilding, but with explicit wlw main pairing this time. My heart soars. Itäranta has definitely landed a spot on the list of my fave authors.

Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay by Annie Proux, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

Proulx’s writing style isn’t necessarily my fave -- it’s quite sparse, unornamented and to the point -- but the story is beautiful and touching in all of its horror and it definitely packs a punch. It’s about rural homophobia, internalised homophobia, love and desires, repression, and life.

This edition also featured three short yet insightful essays about adapting the short story to the big screen.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I…. like Wuthering Heights?? I’m baffled because I was pretty much prepared to dislike it due to so many people talking about how the relationship is really unhealthy and shouldn’t be romanticised, so I was expecting some sort of 1800s version of Twilight/50SoG, but… that’s not what this is?? 

Wuthering Heights is not a love story, it’s not a romance, and it’s not supposed to be. It’s not written as such. The relationship (between Cathy and Heathcliff) is not in any way portrayed as a romantic, healthy pairing you’re supposed to root and strive for (like in Twilight/50SoG) with the expectation that the reader is supposed to be sighing about how romantic and thrilling everything about the romance is. In Wuthering Heights, the abuse is portrayed as abuse, as negative and abusive, and the narrative does not support the reading of Heathcliff as a romantic hero and “Mr. Perfect”.

So, yeah. I like Wuthering Heights. In terms of the locale and characters, the scope of the novel is very small and almost claustrophobic, but the emotional magnitude is astonishing. Some of the characters are vile, selfish, and repugnant much of the time and yet I was so swept up in the story and invested in knowing what was going to happen, that I really enjoyed reading about them and I couldn’t help but symphathise with them because of the masterful storytelling. The portrayals of passion and revenge are so vivid I got chills. And I enjoy the double nature of the book; we have the one half (Catherine and Heathcliff) and the other half (Cathy and Hareton), and I love how it’s one of those hopeful stories about breaking the cycle of abuse, the younger generation doing better than the older.

The novel is also highly atmospheric. The moors, the nature, the wilderness. It all reflects the characters and the fact that the novel is so pointedly not about high society and social niceties.

The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale retold by Jeanette Winterson

My first venture into the world of Shakespearean book adaptations -- and I am so glad it was with such a great one!

The Gap of Time is a remix of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (a tragedy-turns-to-comedy that I read for the first time this month and love a lot!), and to me it’s a very successful one. There are so many things brimming with insight (I feel like I marked up at least 2/3 of the book!), some nice winks at the source material and Shakespeare in general, and tbh I gotta love anything that takes the queer subtext in Shakespeare and makes it explicit. I really enjoy the way Winterson modernised the story and dived a bit deeper into themes like time and family, which were already present in the original play.

However, The Gap of Time did feel a bit rough and unpolished at times, although I wonder whether it was intentional and meant to reflect the way reading one of Shakespeare’s (or anyone’s) plays feels like (since obviously they are meant to be seen and not read per se, and consist of nothing but dialogue).

Puhdistus by Sofi Oksanen

In February, I read the first book in Oksanen’s Kvartetti series about Estonia’s recent history and the East/West dichotomy of Europe. This month, I finally picked up the second novel (and the most well-known of the three books that have been published in the series). I was much impressed reading it, and I can see why it became such a sensation.

Puhdistus is a story about shame and sexual violence from the PoV of two women of two different generations set against the backdrop of Estonian history (from 1940s to 1990s, mostly preoccupied with the occupations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, deportations, the Forest Brothers, and surveillance). The novel is at times brutal and sad, you might even call it a psychological thriller (though I myself wouldn’t go that far), but there’s also a constant thrum of hope of survival persisting throughout an the ending is hopeful. I find Oksanen’s writing a joy to read and I think I’m going to pick up the third book in the series sooner than I picked up this one.

#booklr #bookblr #october wrap up #reading wrap up #monthly wrap up