Excuse – DaneCobain.com

Title: Silas Marner

Author: George Eliot

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 290

Rating: 3/5

I basically picked this book up because my friend Dave has written a musical based on it and so I wanted to see what the fuss is about. I’ve also never read any Eliot before, and so it seemed like a good excuse to finally get started.

Unfortunately I didn’t particularly enjoy it, and in fact having seen the musical, I think I enjoyed that more than the book. With that said, I also understand the hype, and I do think that Eliot is a very talented writer. She got a little bit screwed over by the times that she lived in, really. And in fact, for a book of its period, I think it’s aged rather well. Let’s put it this way – I enjoyed it way more than I enjoy reading Jane Austen.

So would I recommend it? I don’t think that’s a fair question here because I went into it reading for a different reason than most people would have. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed it and I’m glad that I picked it up, but I don’t think that’s a good call for a general reader. Even if you’re a fan of the classics, you should proceed with caution.

But yeah, I liked the story itself, even if it did take a while to play out, and I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Raveloe and the development that Marner himself goes through between the start and the end. I still kind of feel as though the story could be condensed and that it would probably work better as a movie (or a musical), but hey ho. I read it.

Learn more about Silas Marner.

William Shakespeare – Othello | Review

Title: Othello

Author: William Shakespeare

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 240

Rating: 3.5/5

William Shakespeare – Othello

This play has been on my TBR pile for a while now, but I didn’t actually get around to picking it up until I saw that Roya Eve Reads, a fellow BookTuber, was reading it. It seemed like the perfect excuse to pick it up too, and I got more out of it than I was expecting to because my copy was second hand and somebody had written their own notes throughout it.

As for the play itself, I enjoyed it, although it was a tad melodramatic at times and there were a few times at which I thought that the plot didn’t really make sense. It was also overly theatrical and ever so slightly racist, but in a weird way it was also fairly progressive for the time at which it was written. And by that I’m basically referring to how Othello is black and how black protagonists were rare, but also how he’s described as thick-lipped. The edition that I had went to great pains to explain that people thought that the devil was black, which was kind of sad to read about.

Still, it’s a decent play and after reading it, I also wouldn’t mind going to see it performed sometime. Not my favourite Shakespeare play, but still a pleasure to read. Bring on A Midsummer Night’s Dream next month.