Hamlet: Globe to Globe (2017): Dominic Dromgoole

Leave a comment

★★★★

Taking Shakespeare to Every Country in the World

I’m going to end the year with a recommendation for your reading lists in 2017. Although it won’t be published until April, this book offers an optimistic note of hope to banish the darkness of what has, by any stretch of the imagination, been a bleak year. The context is this. Back in 2012, Shakespeare was at the heart of the cultural festival that accompanied the London Olympics. The main feature was the ambitious Globe to Globe festival, during which every one of Shakespeare’s plays was performed, each by a company from a different country, each in a different language. Buzzing from the success of that project, the team were looking for their next big adventure. And it was Dominic Dromgoole, then director of the Globe, who came up with a crazy idea during a genial away day. Why not tour Hamlet to every country in the world?

Continue reading →

Short Stories from Tor.com

2 Comments

tor

One of the things I most enjoy about Tor.com, a website focusing on science-fiction and fantasy publishing, is their original fiction. Recently I’ve been pleased to see that some of their short stories have been published as ebooks, complete with gorgeous covers that are designed for each one. At around 30 pages per story, these make wonderful amuse-bouches between more lengthy reads and are usually less than £1 a piece on Amazon. And, if you’d rather read them for free, you can always seek them out on Tor.com itself. As the stories aren’t long enough to warrant individual posts, I thought I’d collect my thoughts together five at a time.

Continue reading →

How Far to Bethlehem? (1964): Norah Lofts

Leave a comment

★★★½

I discovered this book during a pre-Christmas exploration of the Book Barn, a few miles from where I live, and decided it was perfect for the festive season. The plan was to finish it last night, on Christmas Day, but what with the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special, and the satiety brought on by too much Christmas pudding, I didn’t quite get round to it. It’s a thoughtful, rich rendition of the Nativity story, in which the familiar events of the bible are set within their historical context at the turn of the 1st century AD. Most intriguing is Lofts’s vision of the three wise men, who between them span the three known continents of the ancient world.

Continue reading →

Merry Christmas!

8 Comments

Netherlandish School: The Nativity

And so, once again, it’s time to sit back and congratulate ourselves on having got through another year. 2016 has been interesting, hasn’t it? – much in the manner of the old Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’. However, here at The Idle Woman there has been some light and happiness so, in the interests of peace on earth and goodwill etc., I thought I’d focus on the good stuff.

Continue reading →

Boudica: Dreaming the Serpent Spear (2006): Manda Scott

6 Comments

★★★★

Boudica: Book IV

I’ve been saving the fourth and final Boudica novel until the Christmas holidays, because the epic sweep of these books demands a bit of focus. Besides, I’ve grown deeply fond of Scott’s characters, who blend courage and nobility with a profound self-knowledge, and I wanted to savour the conclusion properly. I’ve followed their stories across four books and three decades, but all things must end.

Continue reading →

Mort (1987): Terry Pratchett

5 Comments

★★★★

The Discworld Reread: Book IV

Mortimer, usually called Mort, is nice, well-meaning, but ultimately a bit hopeless. In an effort to make him into someone else’s problem, his father takes him down one Hogswatchnight to the hiring fair in the local town, but no one’s interested. It seems that the gangly boy can’t even be given away. Optimistic to the last, Mort insists on waiting until the last stroke of midnight, just in case a potential employer comes late to the fair. And, sure enough, as the bells strike out over the town, a strange figure appears, cowled and riding a white horse (whose name is Binky), to make Mort an offer that he can’t refuse. He always hoped he’d become an apprentice. He just didn’t think he’d be working for Death.

Continue reading →

Equal Rites (1987): Terry Pratchett

5 Comments

★★★ ½

The Discworld Reread: Book III

Some more light reading was necessary after that brilliant, but thought-provoking last book and I returned with contentment to the Discworld. While the first two books dealt with one overarching storyline, this third novel breaks the mould and adopts the pattern that Pratchett would use in the rest of the series. Each book, while it features one or more of his recurring characters, is based around a particular theme or concept and can stand virtually alone. And so here, in Equal Rites, we turn our attentions away from Rincewind and the Luggage towards the distant Ramtop mountains, and one very special baby.

Continue reading →

Messages from a Lost World (2016): Stefan Zweig

2 Comments

★★★★ ½

Europe on the Brink

Everyone has been talking about echo chambers recently. Those of us cosily insulated in our liberal-metropolitan-elite ivory towers, with our European friends and our Guardian diet, have had quite a wake-up call this year. We were lulled by our Facebook and Twitter feeds, which reflected back our own views ad infinitum, until it seemed inconceivable that anyone else could think differently. Now we find ourselves in a situation where we have to justify or, worse, defend our longing for a community greater than ourselves. In light of all this, Pushkin Press’s publication of Stefan Zweig’s essays is nothing short of inspired. Written a hundred years ago, these short pieces are charged with the despair of a generation which weathered two cataclysmic wars. They are terrifyingly relevant today. Simple, powerful and unapologetically intelligent, they’re absolutely vital reading as we wait in the shadow of Brexit. Unfortunately those who most need to read them are precisely those who won’t.

Continue reading →

The Red Sphinx (1866): Alexandre Dumas

4 Comments

★★★★

Now that Christmas is almost upon us, we can start planning reading lists for the New Year. For those who love derring-do, intrigue and swashbuckling, there’s a treat coming up in January: a fresh new translation of a little-known sequel to The Three Musketeers. Although the musketeers themselves don’t appear, there’s a handsome young hero, a beautiful heroine, battles, plots and, bestriding everything like a colossus, the Red Sphinx himself: the shrewd Cardinal Richelieu.

Continue reading →