Macbeth by William Shakespeare

When I reviewed and analyzed Julius Caesar in depth back in June, I expected that I’d do the same with all the other Shakespeare plays I read while I have had this blog. And yet, I cannot “analyze” Macbeth. While I enjoyed reading Macbeth, it was not a “deep” reading experience for me. I’ve found I’ve been putting off writing this review because I don’t have such a deep analysis to give you. In fact, while I could reread it a few times, I’m ready to move on.

My first thought when I picked up Macbeth two weeks ago was, “Wow, this is perfect for Halloween.” Macbeth starts with thunder and lightning and three very spooky witches.

My second thought was that Macbeth was amazingly readable. I didn’t find myself stumbling over sentences (especially when I read it aloud with a bad Scottish accent, hehe), but beyond that the play itself is incredibly straight forward, more so than Julius Caesar was, which I read a few months ago. Unlike Julius Caesar, I didn’t need to read commentary to understand it or be fascinated by the setting Shakespeare created.

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The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

The narrator of Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, is dead.

Meet Susie. Susie Salmon was 14 when she was brutally raped and murdered in a cornfield near her home. Now, as her family recovers and learns to live again, she watches them from her gazebo in her heaven and begins to come to terms with her own death. Despite the brutal beginning to Susie’s death, her story becomes one of celebrating life.

By the end, there were a number of things I didn’t enjoy about this book, but overall, I found it more refreshing than that simple (and potentially gruesome) summary may sound. The Lovely Bones focuses on a brutal subject (assault and murder and the aftermath) and yet, from the beginning, the tone was calm.

Because the narrator was the one who was dead, we already knew she was “okay.” In some respects, it took the entire book for Susie and for the rest of her family to come to that understanding: it is okay to celebrate the dead, and it is okay to move on and keep living and loving.

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