Book notes

Category: Plays

  • Macbeth by William Shakespeare

    I’m not sure how I never had to read Macbeth in its entirety when I was in school, but I didn’t, and despite feeling like I knew many little pieces of it via cultural osmosis/Drunk Shakespeare/Sleep No More/Hamilton song lyrics/having to learn Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking speech in junior high English class, when I told my…

  • The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe

    It was fun to read The Wolves after the last two books I read, because it felt like there were some commonalities, while all three are also very different works. Each act of The Wolves is set at an indoor soccer field, where we see a team of teenage girls warming up before their weekly…

  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts 1 & 2 by Jack ThorneArthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic), 2016

    I wasn’t necessarily planning to read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child—I mean, I like the Harry Potter universe and I’ve read all the books but, eh, a play written by someone other than J.K. Rowling, based on a story that she co-wrote with him and another guy? I don’t know; I wasn’t convinced I’d…

  • Proof by David AuburnFaber and Faber, Inc., 2001

    Reading Proof, I thought of Rebecca Goldstein’s Properties of Light, though I don’t remember enough about the latter to properly compare the two works. Both share a similar central triangle: brilliant/mad father (a physicist in Goldstein’s book, a mathematician in Auburn’s play), brilliant/possibly unhinged daughter, plus a (male) student of the father’s who is the…

  • Grief Lessons: Four plays by Euripides, translated by Anne CarsonNew York Review of Books, 2006

    I like the lucidity of Carson’s prose, the framing essays around these plays, and the prefaces to each one: the sense of knowledge and ease and also a sly smile when she writes things like “The first eight hundred lines of the play will bore you, they’re supposed to.” The four plays: Herakles, Hekabe, Hippolytos,…