All of my reading these days is school-related.  I just finished The Last Time I Saw Mother by Arlene Chai for my anthropology class on Asian families, and am working on Kokoro by Natsume Soseki for my Japanese literature class.

Before I got bogged down with school reading, I'd started Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, which is a little hard to follow.  At the moment, it seems like two books in one, where the perspective changes every other chapter or so.  It seems like the two plots might, at one point, flow together, but I've only gotten maybe 150 pages in, so don't spoil it for me if you've read it, okay?

I just started reading Night on the Galaxy Railroad So happy, I've been meaning to read it forever.

As for other Japanese authors, I'm making my way through a collection of some of Yukio Mishima's short stories. He's the one who committed seppuku after trying to take over a governmental office in the 1970's.

Just made it to volume 4 of the unabridged, translated Journey to the West.  ~1750 pages down, another 550 to go!

Then I move onto Outlaws of the Marsh.  I am, apparently, both masochistic and on a classical Chinese novel kick.

In my English class, we're reading The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. My teacher is trying, and failing, to convince my classmates that the men in this play aren't gay.

Teacher: "No, they're not talking about that kind of instrument! You all have really dirty minds today. "
Student: "But I thought that you told us that if something sounded dirty in Shakespeare's plays, it probably is."

I'm just proud of them for not saying anything offensive.

In my public high school we had a read along of Tragedy of julius Ceasar I read... Liviticus (who?) Lines in the book... maybe, though I'm quite surprised that we were able to get through the whole book even with all the immature people in class. I rather enjoyed it.

Giovanna wrote:

Clarice wrote:

I just want to go out and find a nice girl and get laid.

Well hello, Clarice...

Why hello, Dr. Lecter...oh, waitasec...

Giovanna wrote:

Razara wrote:

In my English class, we're reading The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. My teacher is trying, and failing, to convince my classmates that the men in this play aren't gay.

Hey, at least you're getting through it. When I was in high school we were supposed to read Romeo and Juliet and the teacher stopped like two scenes in because no one had any idea what was going on.

It was an AP class.

I miss my high school class from when we studied Othello. Because the boys had this hilarious repulsion-but-oh-such-a-fascination with the whole "was Iago really trying to cop a feel off Cassius?" scenario my teacher brought up on a whim. Heh. But the classiest moment of that was when our head girl wrote an essay about how iago manipulated everyone, using Cassius as "his porn." [falls about in hysterical laughter]

...and in case you are wondering, that's an easier mistake to make than you'd think, in a New Zealand accent. A typical British or American accent makes quite a distinction between the two words, but to a non-native (and occasionally a native) speaker of New Zealand English, "porn" sounds exactly like "pawn." We're such dirty little folk 'round here.

Last edited by Clarice (03-13-2007 01:31:26 PM)

Raven Nightshade wrote:

Anyway, we always read the plays aloud because it was supposed to help us understand it better, but it ended up being more fun and distracting than anything. When we did R&J, I was the nurse. Part of our exam was that the girls had to memorize Juliet's soliloquy, and the boys had to do Romeo's.... in front of the class.  I actually wished that the Baz Luhrmann version had been out then, but it didn't come out for another year or two, so we watched the 196o-something version.  Damn, I think my age is showing.

Was that the version actully filmed in Italy? I think I remember watching it (because I also studied it before the Baz version was out, although literally only by about two months!), but only because that must be the version where in the "morning after" scene, Juliet spends the entire thing holding her sheet to her chest until suddenly she drops it and the boys were all "OOH BREASTS!" and our pretty young English teacher looked like she wished she could sink through the floor. Ah, good times...

It did ruin the drama of the scene for me, though. Ever after to my friends and me it was the "don't look at my breasts don't look at my breasts don't look at my breasts SEE MY BREASTSSEEMYBREASTSSEEMYBREASTS!!!" scene forever after. And to think, I was the sensible one.

Raven Nightshade wrote:

Finally, we did MacBeth for senior year, the only year I wasn't in Honors/AP English. One other student had defected to my class, but he did it by choice. I think that was my favorite play of the four. (It didn't hurt that I watched Gargoyles before I went to school every morning.) We didn't do anything special other than read it aloud and watch the movie. The other former AP student and I were the only ones who made straight A's in that class, but it was so easy, insultingly easy. I wrote a 10 page research paper on dyslexia, and it was (retrospectively) crap. I still got an A because I did what I was supposed to and didn't piss off the teacher on a daily basis. The best part was that we had to read Jane Eyre, the only book we read that year, and I was the only one who made it more than halfway through the book by the time we had the test.

Whee, another Gargoyles fan? Sweet! I was never a fan of the Scottish play, although because I was Teh Drama Queen I always got to read aloud Lady MacBeth's parts. Which I loved. Personally, though, my favourite Wills play is A Midsummer Night's Dream because I got to play Hermia as an over-the-top psychopath teeneybopper. In a bedsheet. Dammit, why did I ever quit acting?

I just finished Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen. It was a pretty good book in my opinion, though a lot of high up reviewer people think it sucks. It's about a guy who lives in the Great Depression era. His family get's killed in a car crash, and his house and money is taken away. So, what would anyone else do? Run off and join the circus, of course! He was studying to be a vet, so the circus takes him in because they needed a vet, and it's all about his life as a vet in the circus. He meets a woman, they fall in love, but she has a bastard husband who beats all the animals. Yeah. I like circuses, and I like elephants, so I thought it was a pretty neat book.

Okay. Carry on.

Razara wrote:

Raven Nightshade wrote:

Part of our exam was that the girls had to memorize Juliet's soliloquy

I memorized Juliet's soliloquy just for the hell of it.

I was Calpurnia in the play, too. I wanted to be Portia, though, because she was my favorite. So far, I think that The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is a good play, so I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested.

Oh my! I love Portia, too! She, in my opinion, destroys the general conception of women.

Mm... Tragedy of Julius Caesar is good, but I like Antony and Cleopatra better though. Hamlet was good, too, even though I was just Fortinbras who only shows up at the end of the play to clean up the mess. -_-

And for Romeo and Juliet, I had to do the lines of the Friar. Come to think of it, I never get the lead role...

I thought that Portia was awesome. She was nothing like the other woman of that time, and she was crazy enough to prove it by stabbing herself in the leg.

In Julius Caesar, the men in that play say, "Peace, ho!" a lot. Whenever the boys in my class read that line, they say it in the tone that a gangster would say, "Peace, hoe!" What exactly is the story of Antony and Cleopatra? I thought that Antony was a very interesting character in Julius Caesar, so is this about him?

For Romeo and Juliet, I was the Prince of Verona, because I had SKU in mind when I volunteered.

Razara wrote:

I thought that Portia was awesome. She was nothing like the other woman of that time, and she was crazy enough to prove it by stabbing herself in the leg.

In Julius Caesar, the men in that play say, "Peace, ho!" a lot. Whenever the boys in my class read that line, they say it in the tone that a gangster would say, "Peace, hoe!" What exactly is the story of Antony and Cleopatra? I thought that Antony was a very interesting character in Julius Caesar, so is this about him?

For Romeo and Juliet, I was the Prince of Verona, because I had SKU in mind when I volunteered.

lol, I did not even know the existence of SKU until Junior in High School. And, yeah, rather than Antony and Cleopatra, it's more Cleopatra-centric. It was the first Shakespeare love story I read, though not in English, but I loved that woman for her passion and her ambition till the very end. Portia was a fighter in my opinion, while Cleopatra is like FIRE! It's personal opinion, though :p

Last edited by Hiraku (03-18-2007 06:10:13 PM)

Razara wrote:

judging a book by its cover.

You know, I do that all the time. I won't poo-poo a book immediately, but a good cover will get me to read the back when I might otherwise pass it by on the shelf. I also live by refusing to read a book where the cover includes: a horse, a dress, and a man with long blond hair.

Giovanna wrote:

Razara wrote:

judging a book by its cover.

You know, I do that all the time. I won't poo-poo a book immediately, but a good cover will get me to read the back when I might otherwise pass it by on the shelf. I also live by refusing to read a book where the cover includes: a horse, a dress, and a man with long blond hair.

Yeah, even though it's technically a "bad" thing to judge something by its cover, you can't help it...
Unfortunately, this is what turns me off from most of the fantasy/sci fi. novels in the library shelf. After watching Utena, so many other things pale by comparison...
I can no longer stand the old storyline of, "We're the good guys! We must kill the dark lord! Blah blah blah blah blah!!!" I will personally make an exception for LOTR and Harry Potter. But, oh god, Eragon, how on earth did you earn so much praise for such a bland storyline... (sorry for the Eragon fans out there...)

I personally plan to finish reading James Joyce's Ulysses and Rushdie's Satanic Verses by the end of the summer. It's gonna be fun read, I know it.

Last edited by Hiraku (03-19-2007 09:23:39 PM)