A Winter's Tale, read, finally.

 I can usually read through a play fairly quickly but this one seemed to take a long time to finish. Part of that is due to the play itself but I think an even bigger problem is the very bad habit I've fallen into of reading and watching t.v. at the same time, not really giving my full attention to either. This hasn't been much of a problem, generally which ever is more interesting I give my attention to while the other languishes; unfortunately A Winter's Tale just never really caught my interest. In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare; Abridged the writers lump all of Shakespeare's comedies into one scene because, as they say, it's all pretty much the same thing (mistaken identities, cross dressers, star crossed lovers and every one gets married in the end). I also kept forgetting who the characters were, I should have read the sparknotes synopsis first, it cleared things up a bit reading it afterward. It's interesting how our preconception of something flavors our expectations of it, for most of the time I was reading this play, I thought it was a tragedy (it certainly starts out that way) and when I realized my mistake I also realized I had been judging it through a lens of what I thought a tragedy should be. For instance I couldn't figure out the inclusion of the comedic characters of Autolycus and (the aptly named) Clown, but even within the parameters of a comedy they still don't seem to have much to do with the plot.  Now it's time to read and reread and reread Born Yesterday as I try to learn my lines, but when not doing that I'm reading Chuck Palahniuk's Doomed. Quite awhile back I decided to read one book off of each shelf of my bookshelf, 6 shelves total, with EmbassyTown I finished that mini-challenge and now I'm going to read the sequels and prequels I have on my shelf. Doomed is the sequel to Palahniuk's Dammed about a 13 yr. old girl who dies, goes to hell, and promptly starts to take over. In between books I try to read some of the ongoing titles I've got on my kindle, after finishing Embasytown I read one of John Wesley's sermons, one of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories, a Sherlock Holmes story, and, of course, one of Shakespeare's plays. Speaking of the complete works of Shakespeare on my kindle, I've now finished all the comedies, all the histories, and all but one of the tragedies, then it's on to the apocrypha and the poems (I've read about 40 of the 154 sonnets). I don't remember everything about all of them, nor can I randomly quote passages from most of them, maybe some day I'll start memorizing sections like Peter Hawkins in Ken Ludwig's Treasure Island.