Book 10 of 100 – A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Just like a previous post of mine that you can find here about Titus Andronicus, I read this play for my Shakespeare class. However, I have already read this before. In fact, I performed this play in High School. I played the very interested character of Helena, and had a great time with it. Because the two characters of Helena and Hermia are supposed to have a very pronounced height difference, they cast me (5’6” at the time) as Helena and a small friend of mine (5’1” at the time) as Hermia. However, they did the casting for the fall play at the beginning of the summer and when we got back to school in the fall, Hermia had grown a few inches after a wonderful summer growth spurt. So to help create the physical height difference that was now not quite as pronounced, I had to wear a pair of very tall heels. Unfortunately, heels and paper mache hills don’t always go so well together. Long story short, I fell a lot and lost all of the trust I had for chicken wire, glue, and strips of paper.

As much as this play hurt me, I still love it. There are so many ways to approach this play. You can enjoy it for its comedic surface, its political statements, its large amount of imagination, or even its semi-feminist character. It is a fun one to read and play around with. I would highly suggest this play to anyone who wants to dabble in some of good ‘ol Shakesy’s work and have a good time doing it.

Book 9 of 100 – “Eleanor and Park” by Rainbow Rowell

This was a very cute book. The young Park and Eleanor slowly fall in love and quickly fall into chaos. However cute this book may be, it was not really my style. It was very much a coming-of-age type novel meant to pull on the heartstrings of young adult readers as they struggle to identify the things that they are feeling much like Eleanor and Park are in the novel. Although it was not necessarily my style, this novel was very well written. Rainbow Rowell uses a simple poetic language to capture the attention of the readers. She creates strong characters and gets inside their heads, and the heads of the teenagers she is writing to.

These characters create a strong novel: until the end. Rowell attempts to leave the readers wanting more and aching for the loss of the characters at the end of the novel almost in a “Fault in Our Stars” manner. I could tell that this is what I was meant to feel, but that is not what happened. Instead, I felt like the end was both rushed and overdue. She could have ended the novel about three chapters before she did, or written more to the story, but instead she stopped in between those two. I wasn’t satisfied, but I wasn’t lost either. I didn’t learn a lesson in the weird ending or keep thinking about what happened, instead, I just finished.