Reading challenge roundup and plans for 2017

I participated in two different reading challenges in 2016.

TBR Pile Challenge
I started doing this a few years ago when it was sponsored by Roof Beam Reader, and although he didn't sponsor one this year, I decided to do it on my own because it's such a great idea. I picked 10 books that I had been wanting to read for quite a while, and built in a couple of alternates, and committed to finally reading them this year. Here's my list, complete with links to my posts.

I completed the challenge by June, which is kind of crazypants, but also not because I read around 100 books every year. So 10 books by June shouldn't actually be that much of a challenge. However, it's not the quantity that is challenging, it's the focus on reading from that particular list.

Bardathon Challenge
I joined this challenge at the beginning of the year when it was being sponsored at a blog. But the blogger stopped posting about the challenge after a couple of months and hasn't even posted to her blog at all since June. But just as some people are unable to complete anything they start, I am unable to let anything go once I've committed to it, so I completed the challenge on my own. As promised in my original post, I completed my goals of reading two comedies, two tragedies, and attending a performance.

I read Macbeth, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The performance I ended up going to was The Tempest so of course I read that one too before I went! It was performed by the Actors' Shakespeare Project and seeing it was SO MUCH BETTER than reading it. They are doing a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the spring and I definitely want to go see that one too.

So what's on my reading agenda for 2017?

TBR Pile Challenge
I've enjoyed this one so much that I'm going to do it again this year even though I'm the only one. It's harder to make a list this time since I no longer have an actual TBR list, but I'm sure I can come up with a list of books I want to commit to reading. I'll be finishing my list very soon and posting it here.

Classic Book-a-Month Club
This is hosted by Roof Beam Reader and I already posted about it here. I won't read every month's choice but I plan to read at least four.

Possibly another challenge?
I've been reading about a lot of different challenges and it makes me want to participate in all of them! But because of my aforementioned allergy to giving up on anything I've started, I don't want to be too impulsive. If I decide to participate in another challenge, you'll be the first to know!

I'm also considering bringing back my To Read list on Goodreads, but I need to think long and hard about how to place restrictions on it so it doesn't get out of hand and feel oppressive like it used to. As liberating as it is to not have this list weighing on me, it's also handy to remember books I've heard about that I might want to read. I'm very forgetty. This year I made a To Read list in my bullet journal, but it's very short. I deliberately didn't give myself much space. I also have a list saved in my library account that's called "Don't forget this book exists," which is made up of books I may or may not actually read but I don't want to forget they exist (as the name suggests).

Happy end of 2016, everyone! Seriously, this year has been truly awful in many ways. I don't honestly have a ton of hope for good things to come in 2017, but at least we can all commit to spending time with some good books. Here's to escapism! Happy reading!

The Tempest

The Tempest by William Shakespeare (1610)

Although I'm technically finished reading plays for my Bardathon Challenge, I'll be seeing a performance of The Tempest in December so I decided to read it ahead of time. In this play, the magician Prospero has been living in exile on a remote island with his daughter Miranda. He conjures a storm which brings to the island several people who had conspired together to oust Prospero. His complicated manipulations result in the marriage of Miranda to the son of the King of Naples, and Prospero's own restoration as the Duke of Milan.

My experience reading this was pretty meh. I enjoyed some of the wordplay and humor, such as when a ship was described as being "as leaky as an unstanched wench." When Trinculo notices the monster caliban he remarks: "What have we here, a man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish, he smells like a fish - a very ancient and fishlike smell, a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-John. A strange fish." Later, that same character says, again to Caliban, "Monster, I do smell all horse piss, at which my nose is in great indignation." So that was all amusing.

Again I read the Folger edition, as I've been reading with the other plays. This time I noticed that some unfamiliar words and phrases weren't explained, though "maze" was defined, which seemed a bit odd. I also had a hard time keeping track of the characters since so many of them seemed interchangeable. And I had a tough time understanding what was happening near the middle, but when all was said and done I think I get the idea.

At this point I sort of think if you've read one Shakespeare play, you've read them all so I probably won't be making a point to read any more. I'm looking forward to this play though - the island setting, storm, shipwreck, monster, and various spirits should lend themselves to a more visual experience.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (1595)

This is the fourth and final play I've read for the Bardathon Challenge. I read the tragedies Macbeth and Hamlet, and the two comedies I chose to read are Much Ado About Nothing and now A Midsummer Night's Dream.

This play is about the entanglement of four lovers: Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena. Lysander and Demetrius both want to marry Hermia, and her father wants her to marry Demetrius, but she loves Lysander. Helena loves Demetrius, but he doesn't care about her. The king and queen of the Fairies, Oberon and Titania are having their own domestic dispute and when Oberon employs Robin Goodfellow to cast a spell on Titania, he also asks him to cast a spell on Demetrius to make him fall in love with the first woman he sees, which should be Helena. Robin mistakes Lysander for Demetrius and all of a sudden everyone is in love with Helena and an unfortunate weaver/actor named Bottom now has the head of an ass. Hilarity ensues.

As with the other Shakespeare plays I've read this year, A Midsummer Night's Dream is light on plot and character development. It's a silly story and I kept getting the characters mixed up, but it was rather funny. I recognized a famous quote, which is always satisfying: "The course of true love never did run smooth." Also satisfying were the insults:

"Hang off, thou cat, though burr! Vile thing, let loose, 
Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent!"

This is a play I would really like to see performed because the magical elements, the woods and the fairies, really lend itself to nice stage designs and costumes. Indeed I've heard that it's quite good to see, and managed to miss a local performance in the spring because I didn't know about it until the last minute.

All I have left for this challenge is to see a play performed, which will hopefully happen this summer. But I'm done with the reading portion of the challenge. As it turns out, I'm pretty much doing this one on my own, just like my TBR Pile Challenge, because the person who was supposed to be sponsoring the Bardathon seems to have stopped participating. But I wasn't doing it for the glory or the prizes anyhow, it was just a way to make myself finally read some Shakespeare. Mission accomplished!

Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare (1598)

I've just finished the third play for the Bardathon Challenge, and the first of two comedies. Much Ado About Nothing is two love stories twined together with some double-crossing and mistaken identities and lots of witty repartee.

Claudio and Hero want to get married until he is led to believe that she has been carrying on with another man like some sort of wanton hussy. Then she faints and her family pretends she is dead so they can see who feels guilty about the deception. Meanwhile another couple, Beatrice and Benedick, are constantly at each other's throats, and obviously totally attracted to each other. Both are determined not to get married at all, and as they sling insults back and forth others step in to trick them into admitting their attraction.

Reading a comedy was a relief after all of the murder and killing of Macbeth and Hamlet. I was already familiar with Shakespearean insults but it was great to read so many in context. This play really was very funny. A constable named Dogberry (and that's not even the funny part) was called an ass at one point, and goes into this whole speech in which he kept interjecting that he is an ass: "But masters, remember that I am an ass, though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass." And in the following scene reminds everyone again, "And, masters, do not forget to specify, when time and place shall serve, that I am an ass." As with the other Shakespeare plays I've read, the plots aren't fantastic, but I guess it's all about the language which is both appealing and vexing.

I've stuck with the Folger edition for this play as well. I tried an Arden again, but although they come so highly recommended, I just find the format very hard to read. Each page has a small amount of text and more than half of the page is footnotes, which seems less orderly than the Folger editions, which have the text on the right and explanations on the left. I was also looking at some No Fear Shakespeare editions, which instead of definitions and explanations have "regular language" text on the facing pages. I think I'd rather have the explanations, but I can see how those editions could be very helpful as well.

I only need to read one more play to complete my goal for the challenge, and the one I've chosen is A Midsummer Night's Dream. I keep feeling inclined to pick it up, but I want to wait until summer for the proper atmosphere. Recently I checked out a copy of Shakespeare's complete sonnets, but the most famous one ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") was ripped out of the book, so I returned it to the library (and we're replacing it.) But I may try some sonnets again in the future since those are less about plot and more about language, which is what he really excelled at.

I've also learned that the Museum of Fine Arts will be presenting a production of Cymbeline this summer, so that might be the performance that I will attend for the challenge. If so, I will want to read the play before going. And the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company will be performing Love's Labour's Lost on Boston Common this summer. I'm not a big fan of the crowds that will be there, but perhaps I'll convince myself (and probably a friend) to attend one of these performances as well.

Hamlet

Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1602)

I may have gotten a little too cocky after reading Macbeth, which was pretty short and easier to read than I expected. Hamlet was another matter entirely.

Hamlet is also a tragedy, and begins with some conversations with a ghost which is presumed to be Hamlet's dead father, the king of Denmark. After his death, his brother Claudius married Queen Gertrude within a month. Hamlet learns that Claudius murdered the former king and vows revenge. His erratic behavior makes everyone suspect that he is mad and Claudius tries to have him sent to England, but he makes his way back, and by the end a number of characters die.

The plot isn't especially complicated or hard to follow, but the play is filled with various soliloquies and philosophical conversations that had my head spinning. Deciphering the language was simple enough in Macbeth when it all pertained to matters at hand, but here much of the dialogue is about more abstract topics and was much more difficult to read and understand.

Again, it was fun to read well-known quotes in context: "Get thee to a nunnery," and "Alas, poor Yorick!" Common expressions that originated in this play include "Neither a borrower nor a lender be," and "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," a favorite phrase of my father-in-law (whose delivery is paraphrased and heavily Boston-accented, but nevertheless recognizable.) Most famous of all is Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, which was quite poetic and nice to read.

Because they are so highly recommended, I picked up the Arden edition at first. The introduction was around 150 pages and so scholarly I couldn't read it. The layout of the pages was difficult as well - on each page there was just a small block of text from the play and the rest was notes, and many of the notes weren't really helpful to me because they went way beyond what I needed to understand the text. Arden must be geared more toward academics, so I think I'll stick with the Folger editions.

I've completed the tragedy portion of my Shakespeare reading for the Bardathon Challenge, and am ready to move on to comedies. Now I'm also considering reading some of his sonnets this year since the plays are not as unpleasant or time-consuming as I was anticipating and I could stand to add to my challenge for a more well-rounded experience of Shakespeare.

Macbeth

Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1606)

I have begun on my Bardathon Challenge! I haven't read any Shakespeare since high school but remember it being fairly arduous, so I was skeptical when, at dinner last weekend, two friends said I could probably read Macbeth in a couple of hours. In reality, it did take me longer, but only because of reading all the notes that accompanied the text. But I still read it all in one afternoon.

So, this is the one about the guy named Macbeth, who meets up with some witches who make predictions that he'll become king so he then murders the king to make this happen. He had doubts, but his wife encouraged him, and they both end up feeling horribly guilty. But then he goes on to kill even more people until he ends up dead himself.

It feels strange to write about something that is so incredibly influential and famous and has been written about to death by a million scholars. But I'm just going to do what I always do and tell you about my experience reading it because that's all I've got. I'm not a scholar of any sort. I wasn't even an English major.

As I said, it was shorter and quicker to read than I expected. Even more surprising was that the language wasn't that difficult for me. I remember how impermeable it felt when I was in high school, but I know more words now, and honestly a few of them I just learned recently from reading Hild ("thane" and "wyrd" are two that come to mind.) I'm glad the language didn't bog me down like it did in high school, because that's the real strength of the play and I'm glad that now I can appreciate it.

It's a pretty weak plot, to be honest. When it is discovered that Duncan, the king, has been killed, Macbeth feigns surprise. But then when they discover that the guards were also killed, Macbeth says he killed them because they killed the king. Nobody bothers to ask why he then pretended he didn't know the king was dead. I mean, seriously. Other parts of the plot I didn't completely understand because I don't really know how royal succession worked in this place and time, but I just rolled with it.

It was satisfying to read such famous lines in their contexts. When I came to the "Out, damned spot" part I remembered quoting that a lot in high school so I think this is the one I read in addition to Romeo and Juliet. It was definitely better the second time. In addition to the passages I recognized, some that I came upon for the first time were especially satisfying, such as when Lady Macbeth is expressing her unhappiness at how events have progressed:

Naught's had, all's spent, 
Where our desire is got without content.
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

Oh, Lady Macbeth, you were a greedy fool and your husband should never have listened to you. Go wash your hands some more.

Although I didn't totally love it, I liked it more than I expected. Honestly, I thought it was going to be a really tough slog and would involve lots of deciphering passages and puzzling over meanings and having to read a ton about it to get anything out of it. Truthfully, I have read a bit about it since finishing, but not because I was so desperate for help. I read the essays included in the book (this is the Folger edition), and even watched some lessons from the Great Courses production How To Read and Understand Shakespeare, which is available through my library on hoopla. Most interesting in this extra reading/watching were the discussions about how this play would have been staged in Shakespeare's day, without scenery and with few props, but elaborate costumes. There's a theater company in Virginia that performs Shakespeare this way now so that people can get a sense of how it was originally.

Another point of interest is that one of the notes in the book mentions that many scholars and editors believe that some of the scenes with the witches were written by someone other than Shakespeare. Which led me to read a bit more about that, and about the different editions of the work that have existed. I mean, this is really really old so many of the earliest editions were altered a lot and it can be difficult to know a lot about the original version and its context.

Reading about Shakespeare is, of course, a rabbit hole and I could spend a whole lot of time reading more about this one play. But I have three more to read this year, which honestly now sounds like a pretty low bar. So it's possible that my year of Shakespeare may turn into more than I intended. Only time will tell!

Bardathon Challenge

I spent a couple of months talking myself into participating in a Shakespeare challenge hosted by Adam at Roof Beam Reader, but then he decided not to host it after all. At first I was relieved, but then I was disappointed so I found another Shakespeare challenge. This one is hosted by Samantha Lin and has several different ways in which you can participate. You can read all the comedies, all the tragedies, watch performances, perform in plays yourself, and various other options listed here. I'm going to do the Mix-and-match option. I plan to read two comedies, two tragedies, and watch a performance. I will, of course, post here about my progress throughout the year.

The reason I want to participate is because I really don't like Shakespeare, but my feelings are based entirely on Romeo & Juliet and Antony & Cleopatra. By the end of 2016 I plan to either have a newfound appreciation for Shakespeare, or actual justification for disliking his work.

For tragedies, I plan to read Hamlet and Macbeth. I haven't yet decided on comedies but I'm open to suggestions.

What is your favorite Shakespeare play? Are you participating in any challenges for 2016?