After the fun romp of Interred with their Bones, I was looking forward to Carrell’s next Shakespearean mystery with great anticipation. I wasn’t disappointed to learn that the focus of her second novel is on Macbeth, one of my favorite plays. However, after finally finishing the novel, I am very divided as to my feelings about Haunt Me Still. On the one hand, I was thrilled to get an inkling into some of the real history behind the plot of Macbeth, which added another whole […]
An ambitious, delightful but very messy Shakespeare murder mystery
This Shakespearean “who-dun-it” is a delightful contribution to this particular genre of historical mystery. It is a glorious mash-up of DaVinci Code-like code-breaking and world-hopping combined with the inexhaustible debate over the disputed authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, and of course, the identity of Shakespeare himself. The chapters jump back and forth between the period of Shakespeare and the present-day, where people within the literary, academic and theater worlds are dying like Shakespeare’s characters, and no one has a clue who the bad guy is, including […]
“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”
First, some things you should know about me, for like, context and stuff: 1. I usually avoid apocalypse books like the plague (or more apropos, the Georgia Flu). Most of the time, even thinking about apocalyptic situations makes me panic. 2. I am a Shakespeare nerd. 3. I am a Star Trek nerd. 4. I cannot explain why I loved this book so much, because most of my reaction was completely sub-conscious. I have gotten gradually more stingy with my five star reviews since I […]
Shakespeare, rare books, murder and mystery
This book drew me with the title alone, but when I read the blurb and discovered that it was about finding and restoring rare books, a cross-century literary mystery, Shakespeare, conspiracy, murder and mayhem, I knew this one was for me. The protagonist is a young American man named Peter Byerly, an antiquarian bookseller with an obsessive attraction to rare books and an equally obsessive aversion to social interaction. Byerly has become a virtual recluse since the death of his beloved Amanda nine months earlier, […]
Shakespeare + Monsters + Dick Jokes = Christopher Moore
As I’ve mentioned before, I love Christopher Moore for his ability to make me forget the troubles of the world. If he has to do that by making me laugh at the most sophomoric humor imaginable, so be it. With Serpent of Venice, though, Moore surpasses this admittedly low bar by adding two other components that I dearly love: Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe. At a book signing I attended, Moore explained that he got the idea for setting a monster story in Venice while […]
Exit, pursued by a wampa.
This second jaunt into Ian Doescher’s Shakespeare/Star Wars hybrid imaginary universe, entitled William Shakespeare’s The Empire Striketh Back, only solidifies my opinion that these adaptations are more than gags and novelties to be gifted to nerdy friends (although they can be used for that purpose as well). I purposely use the word ‘adaptation’ here because Doescher’s attention to detail and his thoughtful approach to both the story and to Shakespeare’s forms and techniques clearly illustrate that although the results for us as readers may be fun […]
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