Monthly Archives: January 2021
What will I find re-reading To Kill a Mocking-Bird immediately after reading A Thousand Moons?
After I’d spent a few days inside Winona’s head I wondered how To Kill a Mocking-Bird would stand up to a re-reading. The links and differences between A Thousand Moons and To Kill a Mocking-Bird jumped out at me as I wondered what to read to follow Sebastian Barry’s work. What did I find different in the experience of re-reading To Kill a Mocking-Bird, written in the 1950s by a woman from Alabama, and that of reading A Thousand Moons written in the 2020s by an Irishman? Continue reading
Reading a play like a novel. Hamlet (Shakespeare) and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead (Tom Stoppard)
Is it possible to read a playscript as one reads a novel? Does reading a play’s script improve the experience of watching it? And if it does, is it better to read a script before or after seeing the play? In Hamnet Maggie O’Farrell contends that Shakespeare gave his dead son fresh life in the character of Hamlet, as well as creating a memorial to Hamnet. Is this reasonable? On reading Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Continue reading
Is a writer’s world basically evil or fundamentally sound? Death at the Dolphin Ngaio Marsh
Some crime writers write as if evil is omnipresent and lurks below the most innocuous surface, everyone is capable of crime, and nearly everyone has a secret in their past that they would commit a crime to conceal. Others write as if they feel the world is fundamentally okay, people of goodwill are in the majority, crimes are unusual and happen as an outcome of unusual circumstances Continue reading
Why do I re-read a book? Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Discussion of reasons to re-read a book, and review of Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
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