Yes, it has been over 4 months since I last posted. So hey, welcome to 2015! My absence can be directly explained by life, predominantly all kinds of horribleness at work resulting in 60 hour days for over 4 months (almost exactly linked to the duration of my absence).
And I think that Hamlet could quite possibly have been the worst possible book/play to be reading during this time. Because it required more brain cells than I could usually muster up on a given evening (assuming that I actually had more than 10 minutes in the evening to do anything remotely connected to my personal life). Under normal circumstances, Shakespeare is no walk in the park to read, but after working 15 hour days, usually all I wanted to do was drive silently in my car home and go to sleep, as a form of mental self-preservation. Or else I would end up like a blurbering idiot (yes, I will make up words as I see fit, thank you very much) unable to string but a few simple words together. Much like this blog - ha!
So I'm back on task and moving forward with reading stuff again, finally. And now that life has returned to a pleasant pace, and spring has finally broken the miserable winter, all I want to do is sit in the sunshine with a book. I hope to indulge in this desire as much as possible now.
So about that Hamlet. I've mentioned before that when I read a book, I have to read everything from cover to cover, including all of the other additional pieces added by the editors to enhance the reading experience. This can include portraits of the author, critical essays of the text, timelines of the context of the story, etc. And in the case of the Signet Classic version of Hamlet, there were 17 (!!!) different additional pieces added into the book aside from just the play. So the play itself probably took me only 2-3 weeks to actually read, while most of my delay was slogging through all of the other stuff. And while some of it was interesting (I am fascinated by the ways in which the play has evolved over the years - you'd be surprised to know that the version that everyone knows of Hamlet is probably not the original version as Shakespeare wrote it), some of it...well, not so much (I'm talking to you critical character analysis). This is probably going to be a big deterrent for me when considering to read other Shakespeare plays in the future...I'll probably go for, not the most handy version of the book at the bookstore, but the one that has the least other "stuff" in addition to the actual play.
There are so many iconic lines from Hamlet ("To be or not to be", "To thine own self be true", "What a piece of work is man", "The soul of brevity is wit", etc etc) and so many iconic visual images (the drowning of Ophelia, pretty much any image of Hamlet holding up a skull) that there doesn't seem to be much need for me to go into any significant detail about the play and/or what I thought about it. There are many who are far more learned than I who have studied this play for their entire lives who can certainly provide significant amounts of evaluation and interpretation. However, I must say that it was nice to actually read the play to finally understand all of the things that Hamlet has become so known for in popular culture.
Speaking of Hamlet in popular culture, I know I previously mentioned that I'm a huge Sons of Anarchy fan, and I probably spent half of my time while reading Hamlet completely preoccupied with analyzing the TV show in respects to its relationship to Hamlet. And while part of that was trying to match up the characters to their TV counterparts, I think in the end I decided that it's not that straightforward (Clay, Gemma, and Jax are the obvious parallels, and initially I had thought that Tara was the obvious Ophelia but now I'm leaning towards Opie being the more suitable choice for Ophelia). Overall, there is so much consideration to be given to the themes and characters across both, that it would require an entirely separate post and a re-viewing of all of the SOA episodes, which I'm certainly not ready to consider yet. But man, if you had the time and inclination, you could write a thesis on that.
So onward we move. In less than 3 weeks time, I will have almost a month off from work, during which, reading is on the top of the list of priorities (I love priorities that are based around me exploring things that I do for the sole purpose of personal delight and joy; but shouldn't that be everything?). I'll also be on a 2-week trip where I'll have lots of time to read on airplanes and in airports, so needless to say, I'm REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO IT. I'm now starting The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty and am also reading The Beak of the Finch (which should give you a clue about where my awesome 2-week trip will be...and which means I'll probably have to put The Origin of Species higher up on my "to read" list). Happiness returns to a girl who has time to curl up with a good book. Until next time! (Which will not be 4+ months from now).
