No update on my side, still reading same book as last week:
- The Better Part of Valour by Tanya Huff. Book 2 of Confederation series. I made some progress though and am near the finish.
What about all of you? Which books have you been reading or listening lately?
I just finished The Heavens by Sandra Newman. I’m not quite sure what to make of it.
It’s about a woman who lives in turn of the century New York (meaning 2000-ish. God I’m old), but when she sleeps she is transported, possibly literally into the life of Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady.”
She has a distinct and poetic voice and the book is a sad and quiet and beautiful meditation on greatness and madness and love and hope and meaning.
It’s also meandering and depressing and the 16th century stuff feels well researched but superficial, and some of the choices later in the book feel rushed and like she felt they had to be there but they don’t exactly fit the tone.
Gonna have to digest this one for a bit, which I guess means it challenged me and that’s a good thing.
Does this book require any prior knowledge of Dark Lady?
Nope. The “Dark Lady” is not a play or a poem, but rather scholars’ nickname for the subject of a couple dozen Shakespearian sonnets, and one of the plausible candidates is the woman in Newman’s novel, which isn’t really “about” Shakespeare anyway.
Here’s one, Sonnet 130, where our boy is taking the piss, trying to reframe cultural expectations around literary love, or maybe a bit of both. Poems like this show why he was both brilliant and perfectly likely to have been the educated-ish son of a provincial merchant. Christopher Marlowe didn’t write shit like this.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red, than her lips red: If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound: I grant I never saw a goddess go, My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare, As any she belied with false compare.