As You Like It / William Shakespeare / 263 pgs / Audiobook / Movie Adaptations

I'm in the process of reading all of Shakespeare's works, roughly one a month so far, and I just finished As You Like It. I like reading them in print and then listening to an audio version. This is a great Shakespeare production in performance, but I was underwhelmed reading it. The circumstances give the Bard quite a few opportunities to comment on gender, especially when Rosalind is dressed as Ganymede. She has many more freedoms as a man and knows she’ll be giving up a lot when she goes back and again when she marries. There’s also some muted commentary on race and station which I didn’t catch until reading background information. Celia and her friendship with Rosalind is my favorite part about this play. As one of my friends pointed out to me, this is “beach read Shakespeare” and best experienced in visual or audio form!

Girl with a Pearl Earring / Tracy Chevalier 233 p.

Girl with a Pearl Earring / Tracy Chevalier 233 p.

Tracy Chevalier wonderfully takes the reader into the 17th century world of Delft.  Girl with a pearl earring tells the story of Greit, a 16 year old, who takes a job as a maid in the home of painter Johannes Vermeer after her father is blinded in a tile factor accident.  She is perceptive about her world.  Through her narrative, the daily grind of laundry, meal preparation, food gathering, and, child care is so richly and gently detailed that one sees Greit's raw, red, chapped hands.  Chevalier tells how a maid became the subject of one of Vermeer's greatest portraits.