Madison

This book has got to be one of my new favorite books. It's beautifully written and I recommend it to everyone.

Much Ado About Nothing is certainly top 5 Shakespeare ever, even if I haven't read enough of them to have a true ability to rank them. I love it nearly as much as I love Hamlet, if for completely different reasons. I will say, though, that this play is very much advantaged by performance; I don't know that I would like it near so much if I had read it without seeing it first. Being a comedy, the parts that are supposed to be funny can come off worse without the comedic sensibilities of whoever performs them. To read it is amusing, but to see it is hilarious. Even still, I love Much Ado.

❤️

I am in love with this book! Unlike pride and prejudice, I read this one blind and it has much improved my enjoyment of the story. However much I love pride and prejudice, the joy of reading it was dampened by already knowing the major plot beats, courtesy of the film. For persuasion, however, I had never seen any adaptation or been told of the events of the story, so all the emotions meant to be evoked by the fantastic writing were entirely unsuspected and entirely genuine. Wentworth is a joy. That letter! “Most ardently” has some competition, in my opinion.

I never thought I'd read an Ali Hazelwood novel (being prejudiced against Reylo and having the eyes to see the cover of Love Hypothesis, as well as not finding any particular appeal to Adam Driver), but this really surprised me and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It might be the chess, since I don't really have an interest in the STEM subjects of her other works, but either way I loved it. I think maybe the really casual and blatant approach to sex would make me hope there's no younger teenagers reading this, but for my own age range there was nothing explicit. This novel isn't a masterpiece of modern literature by any means, but I really liked it and would definitely read it again. It's also managed to make me feel like getting even more into improving myself in chess, so thanks to this book, my next literary purchase will probably be chess related.