New Year's Resolution: Read every Shakespeare play in one year
Even though this my LiveJournal has, in the past three years, morphed into a programming diary and recipe blog, I thought I probably ought to blog this.
I've never been a fan of New Year's Eve. I see it as the most depressing of holidays, because it combines many things I loathe: staying up late, high-pressure social events, deadlines, endings, reminders of the inexorable flow of time that marches us all towards the grave. It comes during the letdown period after the festivities of Christmas have ended, and it inaugurates the darkest, coldest, dreariest part of the year.
But now, I live in the Southern Hemisphere, where New Year's Eve instead comes in the brightest, sunniest, cheeriest part of the year. That alone has made it better for me, so now I'm embracing this opportunity to turn it around. I've always seen New Year's Eve as being a kind of funeral for another dead year, and New Year's resolutions as joyless pledges to do unpleasurable things, which then induce guilt when we fail at them. But I realize now, you can see it the other way, with New Year's Eve being about the gift of a new year to enjoy, and New Year's resolutions as promises to do something fun.
So in that spirit, my New Year's resolution this year is to read every one of Shakespeare's plays. Like most people, I was forced to read "Romeo and Juliet" and "Julius Caesar" in an English class in my early teens. Likewise "Hamlet" was assigned to me at university. And since then, being an English major, I've read a few for fun: "Othello", "The Tempest", "Midsummer Night's Dream", and, randomly, "Henry V" (because I found a miniature paperback of it in a box of my late grandfather's things, when I was around 15).
So, I've covered a lot of the big Shakespeare plays, but there are still a lot of them that I haven't read. The ones I have read, I've enjoyed. Once you get through the formidable obstacle of the language, the underlying stories are very engaging, the wording is poetic, the jokes are funny, and the dramas are touching. So why not read them all?
I've never been a fan of New Year's Eve. I see it as the most depressing of holidays, because it combines many things I loathe: staying up late, high-pressure social events, deadlines, endings, reminders of the inexorable flow of time that marches us all towards the grave. It comes during the letdown period after the festivities of Christmas have ended, and it inaugurates the darkest, coldest, dreariest part of the year.
But now, I live in the Southern Hemisphere, where New Year's Eve instead comes in the brightest, sunniest, cheeriest part of the year. That alone has made it better for me, so now I'm embracing this opportunity to turn it around. I've always seen New Year's Eve as being a kind of funeral for another dead year, and New Year's resolutions as joyless pledges to do unpleasurable things, which then induce guilt when we fail at them. But I realize now, you can see it the other way, with New Year's Eve being about the gift of a new year to enjoy, and New Year's resolutions as promises to do something fun.
So in that spirit, my New Year's resolution this year is to read every one of Shakespeare's plays. Like most people, I was forced to read "Romeo and Juliet" and "Julius Caesar" in an English class in my early teens. Likewise "Hamlet" was assigned to me at university. And since then, being an English major, I've read a few for fun: "Othello", "The Tempest", "Midsummer Night's Dream", and, randomly, "Henry V" (because I found a miniature paperback of it in a box of my late grandfather's things, when I was around 15).
So, I've covered a lot of the big Shakespeare plays, but there are still a lot of them that I haven't read. The ones I have read, I've enjoyed. Once you get through the formidable obstacle of the language, the underlying stories are very engaging, the wording is poetic, the jokes are funny, and the dramas are touching. So why not read them all?