I read five books in September. Coriolanus and All’s Well that Ends Well by Shakespeare. A novel called All’s Well by Mona Awad. Orlando by Virginia Woolf and Rooted by Edward Rhodes. Let’s look at them one by one.
Coriolanus & All’s Well that Ends Well
I read these two Shakespeare’s plays in September and made a dedicated video for each so I won’t say much more here (I’ll link them at the end of the post). Both of them have protagonists with complicated personalities – I had a great time reading and thinking about them.
Reflecting on myself as a beginner reading Shakespeare, I can see myself understanding his language better and enjoying the plays more in little steps. My Coriolanus video is 28mins – I would never have believed I could one day talk about a character in a Shakespeare’s play for 28mins! If you’ve been here for a while, you might remember my ‘review’ of The Tempest in my November wrap up last year – I simply had nothing to say! It was shocking to see how lazy I was but also nice to see how far I’ve come on the journey.
I feel this a lot recently that the earlier I get to a book, more unfair I was likely to be towards that book – because I was such an awful reader! I feel sorry for the classics I read and disliked because it’s probably something to do with me and nothing wrong with the books! I’m still very new to a lot of the classics and authors and it’s quite nice to know, even if I wronged them, there are many more titles to read, many opportunities to become friends with them, and there’s much more to learn.
All’s Well by Mona Awad
I thought this would be a perfect book to read since I have just finished All’s Well that Ends Well. So I bought the audiobook immediately. I didn’t like it, but I think it was a very clever and effective book with excellent writing. I just didn’t like the story itself or the protagonist – I even think maybe that’s the author’s intention, I’m not sure. The protagonist Miranda is not a straightforward character, just like Helen from All’s Well that Ends Well. And I certainly didn’t like Helen either.
The protagonist was a theatre teacher in a high school. She had unbearable pain in her back, legs and feet from a theatre accident followed by a series of surgery accidents when she was an actor. She decided to put on All’s Well that Ends Well this year instead of Macbeth despite the school curriculum and made herself unpopular with the students. Her favourite student Elly only got a minor role even though she was perfect for Helen, because Helen was to be played by another girl, whose parents were rich and influential. One day, almost overnight, everything changed – her chronicle pain went away, students obeyed her every word, and the rich girl got sick so Elly got to play the lead. Like magic. All’s well. But what was the dark side of this magic and what was the price to pay?
It obviously has a lot to do with All’s Well that Ends Well. For example, the uncertainty of the ending, all seems to be well but is it really well? And all seems to be well at the end, does that mean the happy ending justifies the means?
It also has a lot of reference to Macbeth, e.g. Miranda fell off the stage when she played the role of Lady Macbeth; the three men in black suits in the pub were clearly the three witches; the protagonist getting rid of people in her way one after another was a bit like Macbeth himself as well.
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
The full title is Orlando a Biography. It’s a fictional biography. We first meet Orlando in his great country house, at age 16. In one of the memorable moments in chapter one, we see him kneeling in front of Queen Elizabeth the first. The biography ends in 1928, the year Virginia Woolf wrote and published the novel, with Orlando as a woman aged 36.
I heard Orlando described as something like ‘a person lived through four centuries and changed genders in between’. I have always been curious about how he lived through four centuries and how he changed genders. Did he live, die and keep being reborn as the same person? Did he change into a man or woman each time? I have now found out that he lived one life that lasted about 400 years and changed from man to woman once – if you were wondering the same thing as well, here you go.
When I realised Orlando was going to live through 400 years with little aging, my questions were how was Virginia Woolf going to mark the progress of time and history throughout the novel and how people were going to react to Orlando’s slow aging process. I think for the second question, I was clearly too pragmatic because Woolf was very playful about it. Nobody minded it at all, a few other characters actually aged at the same speed as Orlando himself. It was the same with his change of sex, his household staff and social circle seemed to think it the most natural thing.
At one point during Orlando’s life, he set out to furnish his ancestral home:
Indeed, when Orlando came to reckon up the matter of furnishing with rosewood chairs and cedar-wood cabinets, with silver basins, china bowls, and Persian carpets, every one of the three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms which the house contained, he saw that it would be no light one…
Then I remembered in memoir Mad about Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate describes the building project of Thomas Sackville, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth the first:
He embarked on a huge rebuilding project, creating a home with 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases, twelve entrances and seven courtyards. The Sackville have lived there ever since…
Orlando’s house with 365 bedrooms is the same house built by Thomas Sackville. And this is the manor of Knole in Sevenoaks, the home of Vita Sackville-West, who had an intimate relationship with Virginia Woolf. You can still see it today. It’s breathtakingly beautiful even just looking at the pictures. And with the history and association with Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Shakespeare – I would love to spend a whole afternoon there!
There are many other links between Orlando in the novel and Vita in real life. Orlando married a woman called Pepita, which was the name of Vita’s grandmother. Orlando had to go through a legal battle to inherit her family home when she became a woman, that echoed the fact that Vita couldn’t inherit Knole because she was a woman.
Woolf is still a challenging author for me. I need to read it again and get to know it better before I can give any intelligent comments. I’ll just quote Jonathan Bate for now, ‘the book is a love letter not only to Vita, but also to English literature’.
Rooted, Reconnecting with the History of the Church
It’s an introduction of church history mostly in Europe between the end of the New Testament and the 20th century. Each chapter covers a historical period. It’s very impressive a 200-page book tries to cover 2000 years of church history.
But I think the problem is obviously the author can’t spend too long in any period or give many examples of personal lives during those times. It reads like a textbook or a very long Wikipedia page with a lot of facts and I learnt a lot but I also mixed everything up very quickly.
Here are a few interesting facts I learnt:
- The mechanical clock was invented in the Middle Ages by monks because ‘[they] needed to know the times for their appointed prayers.’
- Apparently while Lutheranism strongly emphasises justification through faith alone, it is still a lot closer in much of its theology to the Catholic Church than most other branches of Protestantism. It is Zwingli rather than Luther who established the doctrines familiar to most evangelicals.
- When it talks about the Great Awakening in Britain, it says, ‘While John Wesley died as priest of the Church of England, Methodism broke away from Anglicanism following his death and became yet another denomination of Christianity, with a particular presence among working-class, industrial communities in England and Wales. This work of the Methodists among poorer communities, and the fact that many of the French Revolutionary leaders were deists or atheists, almost certainly helped prevent the spread of such violent revolution to Great Britain, despite the existence of many home-grown radical movements.’
I’d love to read a book just expand on that single paragraph! Any recommendations?
Happy reading everyone!
A Day of Small Things 