Iskanderia wrote:
Your saying "can you believe I've never read The Taming of the Shrew" made me realize I've never read any Shakespeare other than bits of Romeo and Juliet in high school. And I'm okay with that. I don't like reading things that are worded so oddly or old-timey that I have to read it slowly and try to figure out what each sentence means. I'm not a dummy who can't handle "difficult" books, but if I can't read it quickly without frequently having to stop to try to parse the meaning of the words on the page, it feels like work and it's not enjoyable.
H.P. Lovecraft is the only writer like that that I actually enjoy reading but his writing isn't difficult, it's just that he likes to use as many obscure words as possible and I have to read him with a dictionary near by because he does it so often and it's not always possible to figure out the words from context.
Gosh, well get yourself a No Fear Shakespeare book by Sparknotes!
I think the only Shakespeare I'd recommend is "Othello" because the plot is SUPERB and I think it's pretty readable. It'll make you upset, I'm telling you. Iago was the best character, hands down. I think Shakespeare is better when acted out, not when read, at least for me.
I've only read Shakespeare when forced to, except for "King Lear," so I get what you're saying. (Oh wait, I did read "A Midsummer Night's Dream" lol) I prefer Greek tragedies (which aren't written in Shakespeare's English), especially the Oedipus plays. I also like Greek and Roman political writings, for some reason they appeal to me more. And I have a soft spot for Aristophanes. I understand Shakespeare's importance in the world, but honestly I don't often feel inspired by what he writes. I can read it fine enough, but the meaning of the words and the plays don't move me, make me feel as if I learned something about English writing, or... anything, really. There's just one line in "Hamlet" that I really like, and it's in the first act and it's about Hamlet's father.
Here:
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Nerdy fact about myself: I get depressed over lost works of literature, especially Greek and Roman literature
I guess for "English" language/Western literature I like Romantic authors, historical fiction (I used to read this all the time when I was tiny), St. Augustine (he wrote in Latin but I'm just putting him here), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Atwood, but anyways, my favorite author is Virginia Woolf. She's tough to read at first, and I remember I had a hard time following how "flowy" (not sure if that's the right word) she was for the first few pages, but I finally got it and now I appreciate it so much more. She's not really tough, but she's kind of unusual in her writing so you're somewhat disoriented at first. I can go on about her, but I love her sentence structures, the words she uses, but most of all, the ideas she has. Besides her fiction, I love her essays about women, other authors, and about observations she has. And her diary entries are wonderful too since she's less reserved, a nerd, and is using her entries to practice her writing. Now SHE really inspires me to think about all sorts of things, whether it's mental illness or how moments are slipping by and how I wish I could cling on to all of them or anything really, and to practice writing.
My favorite writings though are classical Chinese novels and plays. I don't think they're particularly hard to read since it depends on the translation. For example, "The Tale of Heike," translated by some McCullough guy, was dry and complicated, and I didn't like it much even though it was a military epic, something I usually love.
Maybe I'm just used to classical Chinese literature since I've been reading it for so long now (I would say very close to a decade since I started in 6th grade), but honestly they're not that hard and the stories are just great. I think it does depend on the translator though, very much.
This is just me now speaking, but I wish we read more Eastern literature over here. I know it's only my opinion, but the books I've read... I don't know, it's just a completely different experience. I don't read as much in Chinese, so I can't comment on the language, but the themes, characters, structures, etc of all the books I've read were... I have no words for it! They're so vivid and stick in your mind, at least for me.
I'm also into Russian literature and now Spanish, uh, in South America literature XD Not sure how to categorize that, haha. I'm sorry this was long, but I basically agree that Shakespeare isn't my favorite thing ever.