"Words of Wisdom: Quotes from Shakespeare" Coloring Poster Book

One of  my blogging goals for 2019 is to start reviewing adult coloring books again.  So today I'm reviewing the Words of Wisdom: Quotes from Shakespeare book of posters to color.  These are big sheets -- 9 1/2" x 12" and can be framed -- I love the bigger format!  I got this book from Usborne/Kane Miller here, and I'm not sure if it's available elsewhere or not.

The pages are thick like cardstock, so they're perfect for gel pens, which is what I've been using with it.  But if you're into pastels or watercolors, it would work really well with those too, I think.

They've got a nice selection of plays, not just the super-famous ones, and quotations on lots of different topics.  I'm highlighting two lines that involve love today, just cuz it IS We Love Shakespeare Week, after all.  

One of my favorite things about this book is that, on the back of each poster, it tells you a little about the play that line is from!  This is what's on the back of the "Love comforteth like sunshine after rain" poster above:

The posters are in a wide variety of styles.  There's only one with a line from Hamlet, and I haven't colored it yet, but it reminds me a little of Monty Python:

I'm saving this one to color in October because it's so Halloween-y:

This post is one of my contributions to We Love Shakespeare Week, which I'm hosting on my other blog, Hamlette's Soliloquy.  Come join the fun!

The We Love Shakespeare Tag

It's We Love Shakespeare Week over on my other blog, Hamlette's Soliloquy!  I'm doing my bit to celebrate by filling out the official tag, and I'll be reviewing a version of Hamlet later this week, reviewing a Shakespeare coloring book... and I've posted two games over on my other blog too.  You can read everyone else's tags and other posts right here.  Come join the fun!  There's a giveaway too, which is open world-wide.

1. When and how did you first encounter Shakespeare's plays?

When I was in my mid-teens, our homeschool group went to a local community college to watch a travelling theatre troupe present something about Shakespeare.  This would have been around 1996 or so.  They did a few scenes and speeches and talked about common phrases we use today that come from Shakespeare.

And I discovered that afternoon that there were LOTS of titles of Star Trek: The Original Series episodes that come from Shakespeare.  "The Conscience of the King" and "Dagger of the Mind" and "By Any Other Name" and The Undiscovered Country (okay, that's a Trek film instead).  I was fascinated.  I decided to read ALL of Shakespeare's plays to find ALL of the titles and other allusions from Shakespeare that were used in the series.

I got a giant, red faux-leather-bound volume of the complete works of Shakespeare out of the library and simply began with the first play in it, which was Two Gentlemen of Verona.  Not a stellar place to start, but I stuck it out and determinedly read my way through a dozen or so of his plays, renewing the book as often as I possibly could.

So, yup, I owe my fascination with Shakespeare to Star Trek.  

2. What are your favorite Shakespeare plays? (Go ahead and list as many as you like!)

1.  Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
2.  Much Ado About Nothing
3.  The Taming of the Shrew
4.  The Merchant of Venice

3. Who are some of your favorite characters in his plays? (Again, list however many suits you.)

Hamlet, Horatio, Laertes, Ophelia, Beatrice, Benedick, Hero, Don Pedro, Portia...

4. Have you seen any of his plays performed, whether live or on film?

Oodles.  

I've seen 15 different filmed versions of Hamlet (complete list here) because I'm a wee bit obsessed with it.  And I've seen movie versions of Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, Richard III, Love's Labours Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, and two versions of Romeo and Juliet.  I've also seen retellings of The Taming of the Shrew (10 Things I Hate About You and Kiss Me, Kate), Romeo and Juliet (West Side Story), and Othello (the opera Otello).  

Because I studied Shakespeare, literature, and drama in college, I got to go to a lot of live performances of his plays for classes, including The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and Antony and Cleopatra.  Plus, my college's theatre department put on A Midsummer Night's Dream while I was there, which was so much fun.  And since college, I've seen Hamlet performed live twice (in 2009 and in 2018), and Much Ado About Nothing.

5. Have you read any of his plays?

Yes.  I've read 17 of them.  And I've read my favorites multiple times, especially Hamlet, heh.  Definitely more for me to read and enjoy in the years ahead!

6. Share a dream cast for one of your favorite Shakespeare plays.

We need Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender in a new version of Taming of the Shrew, and we need them NOW.

7. What draws you to Shakespeare's plays? (Language, themes, characters, the fact that they're famous, whatever!)

The characters and the dialog, as always.  I enjoy reading his plays for their clever wordplay and wonderful dialog, but the ones I read over and over, I read because I love the characters.

8. Do you have any cool Shakespeare-themed merchandise, like t-shirts or mugs or bookmarks, etc? Share pictures if you can!

Um.  Yeah.  Um, so... the truth is... I have a ton of Shakespeare stuff.  Most of it is Hamlet-related.  I have four different Hamlet-related shirts, a Hamlet Christmas ornament, a whole bookshelf of books about Shakespeare in general and Hamlet in particular, a couple of Shakespeare coloring books... and I have this gorgeous and hilarious mug that my sweet friend Olivia gave me for Christmas a couple months ago.

9. How do you go about understanding his language? (Do you prefer copies with translation notes, look things up online, or just read so much stuff written in Elizabethan English that you totally know what everyone's saying?)

I definitely like copies with little footnotes so I can check on the meanings of words and phrases if I'm unsure of what they mean.  I'd rather not have to go look things up on the internet or in a dictionary, so if there aren't footnotes, I'll just plunge on without checking on stuff and understand the general gist of it anyway.  I've never really found Shakespeare hard to understand overall, even as a teen, but I definitely understand him better when I see his stuff performed than when I just read the text.  I'm a very visual learner.

10. What are some of your favorite lines from Shakespeare? (Maybe limit yourself to like ten, okay?)

I have so many favorites -- what was I thinking when I wrote this question???  Okay, I'm going to take my cue from DKoren's answers to this tag and list off lines I say in real life (or think in my head a lot).  I'm doing these from memory, not looking them up, so forgive me if I miss a word here and there, or if I punctuate them oddly.

"Oh, horrible, horrible -- most horrible!"  (Hamlet)

"The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.  It is a nipping and an eager air."  (Hamlet)

"Against my will, I am sent to bid you come in to dinner."  (Much Ado About Nothing)

"How all occasions do inform against me!"  (Hamlet)

"Sigh no more, my lady.  Sigh no more."  (Much Ado About Nothing)

"Now could I drink hot blood."  (Hamlet)

"Once more unto the breach, my friends!  Once more."  (Henry V)

"The game's afoot."  (Henry V) (Hahaha, you thought that was from Sherlock Holmes!  Well, it is, but he's quoting Shakespeare there.  Holmes quotes Shakespeare quite a lot, really.  I catch him tossing bits of Hamlet around all the time.)

"A horse!  A horse!  My kingdom for a horse!"  (Richard III)

"Adieu!  Adieu!  Remember me!"  (Hamlet)

"The Four-Story Mistake" by Elizabeth Enright

I know I read this as a kid, but I really didn't remember much of it, except that they had a cupola on their house.  I was kinda obsessed with cupolas as a kid, mostly thanks to the Samantha books from American Girl.  Truth be told, I'd still like one. 

Anyway, this is an utterly charming book.  I chose it for my 3rd-6th graders to read for our homeschool co-op this month, so of course, I had to reread it myself.  And I'm so happy I did.  I read one of the later Melendy books, Spiderweb for Two, a few years ago, and found it delightful too.

In this one, Mr. Melendy sells their home in the city and moves his four children, their housekeeper Cuffy, and the furnace man Willy out to a great big house in the countryside.  It has three actual stories and a cupola on top to be the fourth story, and it is full of surprises and secrets and joy. 

The four kids spend the book having all sorts of adventures.  This takes place during WWII, and they spend a good deal of time and energy thinking up ways to earn money to buy war stamps and war bonds.  They put on a play, one person finds a treasure, two of them get jobs... this is a slice-of-life story at its finest.  And I love that sort of book that just has people living out their ordinary lives in an interesting way.

Particularly Good Bits:

None of them wanted to leave their house.  None of them, that is, except seven-year-old Oliver who always greeted the future as a friend and never gave a hang about anything in the past (p. 6).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  G.  Good, clean, wholesome fun.

This is my 27th book read and reviewed for my second time around with the Classics Club.

Top Ten Tuesday: An Addition Problem

I think we can all agree that the biggest problem with being a book addict is the endless list of books we want to read, but which haven't crossed our paths yet for one reason or another.  Today's prompt from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to list the ten books we've added to our TBR list most recently.  So I've pulled ten books from my Goodreads, Amazon, library, and Instagram accounts that I've added to my wishlists over the past month or so.  Here they be.

  

  

  

Have you read any of these?  What have you added to your TBR list lately?

"Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions" by Amy Stewart

I loved Girl Waits with Gun.  I adored Lady Cop Makes Trouble.  But I only enjoyed Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions.  And I think the main reason is that it was not told in the first person by Constance Kopp!  Instead, it was third-person.  And it delved into the point of view of not just Constance, but also Fleurette Kopp and a variety of other characters.  And those characters were central to the story, but they weren't wonderful like Constance.  I'm happy to see that the next book in the series, Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit, looks to be back solidly in first person.  I hope to read it soon.

Don't get me wrong -- Constance Kopp is still the sort of resourceful, level-headed, determined woman I have always striven to be.  And she's finally a full-fledged deputy, with a badge and everything.  I just wish she'd been more central to the story.  Instead, we spent a lot of time with two women who got themselves arrested on charges of improper behavior, basically.  One of them was innocent.  One of them was not.  The book spends a lot of time delving into why a young woman would want to strike out on her own, how limited her options for self-sufficiency were in the early 1900s, and how unfair it is that, even though it takes two to tango, the men involved are never called to account for immoral behavior.  Not that I'm adverse to delving into such unfair truths about the past.  But... I missed Constance.

Still, I flew through three hundred pages of this in just a few days, so it was not boring or something I'm sorry I read!  I just wasn't enchanted by it.  I did really love the historical notes at the end, where Amy Stewart detailed what was totally historical and what she'd fictionalized here and there.  And I liked that World War I played a role in the distance.

Particularly Good Bits:

Mothers go about constantly wondering:  How did this child of mine become a man -- or woman -- of the world? (p. 116)

Nothing -- not a tour with a theater troupe, and certainly not an offer of marriage -- stood a chance against Norma's formidable vocabulary of refusal (p. 151).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  A very stern PG-13 for a lot of discussion of unmarried people behaving like married people.  None of it is lascivious or meant to be titillating, but it's more information that even young teens might need to read about.  Can we call it PG-16 instead?  Anyway, no bad language and not really much violence to speak of at all.  For mainstream fiction, it's astonishingly clean, just like the previous two books in the series.

This is my second book read and reviewed for the 2019 Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

"Grateful American" by Gary Sinise

I'm fumbling around for words to describe or explain or praise this book.  I want to do all three, but it's such a thoroughly good book -- and I enjoyed it so much -- that it's hard for me to write about it without descending into what will sound like sentimental hyperbole.

But I'll try.

I became a fan of Gary Sinise in 1995, when my parents took my brother and I to see Apollo 13 in the theater.  He played astronaut Ken Mattingly, and my brother and I glommed onto him as someone we just wanted to protect and defend, of that makes any sense at all.  Mattingly doesn't get to go on the mission to the moon like he was supposed to, which was a huge disappointment at first, but turned out to be a godsend, as he was on the ground to help figure out ways to get his crewmates back.  Sinise plays Mattingly with a beautifully grounded, sensible, can-do attitude that endeared the character to us from our very first viewing (an emotional event I detailed here in my review of the film).

Later on, I saw Forrest Gump (1994) and The Quick and the Dead (1995) on VHS, and they cemented Sinise in my mind as a Good Guy.  Something about him came across as genuinely upright, more than just a role or behavior he was playing at.  As if he was a nice guy in real life, the sort who would be kind and helpful and, well... an all-around Good Guy.  I've seen him in other roles over the years, and he's long been one of those actors whose presence I can count on to elevate whatever material he's working with.  I can count on him to be interesting and watchable, you might say.

I learned a few years ago of Sinise's work with the Lt. Dan Band, entertaining American troops at home and abroad, working with the USO, and raising money to benefit wounded veterans.  All of which added to my idea of him being a Good Guy.  So I joined the launch team for his memoir and waited with a fair measure of anticipation to receive my advance copy, and I expected to enjoy the book. 

What I didn't expect from this book was liking it so much that I carried it around with me for several days so I could read it while my kids were at swimming lessons and various other appointments.  I didn't expect it to make me laugh AND cry, sometimes within the same page.  I didn't expect it to touch my heart.

In simple, direct, honest words, Gary Sinise lays out his life story.  How he grew up in Chicago, a wild, rudderless teen who found direction and purpose in high school theater classes.  How he and a bunch of friends started the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, now one of the most-respected theatre groups in the country, but originally a bunch of actor pals practicing their craft in a basement.  How he dabbled in alcohol and drugs in the '70s, and drifted through his personal life even while his professional life gained momentum.  And how he eventually found meaning by coming to faith in God and joining the Catholic church, and by finding ways to aid and support military personnel, first-responders, and their families.

Intertwined throughout the book is Sinise's lifelong respect for those who put their lives on the line to defend others.  The military, police, firefighters, and other emergency personnel are often taken for granted in the United States, and Sinise insists we need to change that.  He's made it his mission to let them hear his gratitude loud and clear, to know that they are not forgotten or taken for granted.

I'm not in the military, nor is my husband.  But I have an uncle who served in Vietnam, two cousins who were/are in the Air Force, and some great uncles who served in WWII (one even hit Omaha Beach during the D-DAY invasion).  I also have friends in the military, and many members of our congregation are active duty or retired military.  And I've realized that I almost never thank them for their courage and sacrifices and willingness to preserve our freedom.  I'm not sure yet how I can do that, but thanks to this book, I'm starting to look for ways.  I used to send care packages to some friends and relatives when they were deployed overseas, but no one I know personally is deployed right now.  Still, even if it's sending an encouraging note to a friend whose husband is deployed, or inviting another friend and her kids over for a meal when her husband is away at training, I'm sure that I, like Gary Sinise, can "do a little more" (p. 260).

(From my Instagram account)

Particularly Good Bits:

...when joy connects to mission, a life's purpose begins to take shape (p. 187).

Freedom is not something all human beings simply get to have and enjoy.  A price must be paid, and I am grateful to those who are willing to pay that price, sometimes the ultimate price.  Because of these special Americans, I have been able to live out my dreams, succeed at my chosen career, and turn that success into something positive for others (p. 273).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG.  This is one of the cleanest memoirs I've ever read.  Drugs and alcohol make appearances, and dealing with an alcoholic in the family takes center stage for a time.  There is one curse word. 

"Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson

I remember liking this book as a pre-teen, and I own a couple different movie versions because I love pirates (Disney's 1950 classic and the 1990 one with Charlton Heston and Christian Bale, if you're curious).  So I was excited to re-read it as an adult, and I decided to go ahead and read it aloud to my kids while I was at it.  They love pirates too because one of the few computer games we own is Sid Meier's Pirates, and they all love playing it.

This book did not disappoint.  It didn't disappoint me, as at it may be even more awesome than I remembered.  And it didn't disappoint my kids because it had all the piratical thrills they were hoping for, and then some.  My almost-9-yr-old says this is her new favorite book.  She actually grabbed it and hugged it when we finished it.

I also taught this book to my high school lit students, and while prepping for that, I learned that Stevenson wrote the first fifteen chapters in fifteen days.  My mind is properly boggled by that.  No wonder this book gallops along at a breathless pace!

And yet, it doesn't sacrifice character development for thrills.  Jim Hawkins starts out as a somewhat heedless teen boy who doesn't appreciate the stability and peace of his life at the inn he and his mother run.  By the end of the story, he's matured into a person who recognizes his mistakes and learns from them.  He's also changed from trustful and credulous to being able to see through the machinations of adults.  Most of the adult characters don't have much of a character arc, but it's not really their story, so that really doesn't matter.  To me, anyway.

I suppose there might be a few people here who don't know the basic plot of Treasure Island.  It involves a teen boy named Jim Hawkins and a bunch of adults, some honest and some pirates, all going to an island to try to find a fabulous treasure buried there by Captain Flint.  Long John Silver, the one-legged gentleman of fortune, is the prototype that almost all our modern notions of pirates are based on.  The book as a whole more than earns its reputation as a rip-roaring adventure yarn.

(My Bookstagram photo of my copy)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for some piratical violence, including a boy being threatened and having to shoot guns to defend himself, plus lots of drunkenness and perilous situations.  I had no qualms about reading it aloud to my kids, the youngest of whom is 7, but kids younger than that might find it too tense.

This is my 26th book read and reviewed for my second Classics Club list.