Let's Bust a Recap : Two Gentlemen of Verona

Two Gentlemen of Verona?? More like One Gentleman and One Scumbag of Verona. This is one of the Bard's earliest plays, and oh boy, what a doozy. 

We open on young Valentine gearing up to leave Verona to expand his horizons in Milan and trying to talk his best buddy Proteus into joining him. But Proteus doesn't want to leave his ladylove behind, not to mention he's a lame lazybones who can't be bothered to expand any horizons. 

So Valentine is all, "Hope your life is awesome. Peace out."

But then Proteus' dad is all, "You better get your good-for-nothing behind up and go see the world and quit embarrassing me, you massive disappointment." So then we have to listen to Proteus and his main squeeze Julia go on and on with much sighings and tears and swearing their love eternal to one another. Including exchanging rings and vows. 

Have you already guessed who the scumbag is and who the gentleman is? Hint: Proteus is the scumbag and I hate him. 

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. 

So Proteus follows Valentine literally the very next day accompanied by his servant Launce and Shakespeare's most famous dog Crab. 

(Let me just tell you that Launce and Crab provide a lot of comic relief throughout the play but since Crab's role is entirely non-speaking—what with him being a dog and all—and their bits not having much to do with the main plot: it's hard to translate here. Suffice it to say, we love Crab.)

Apparently within this twenty-four hour window, Valentine has gotten to Milan and fallen hopelessly in love with Silvia who is a total smokeshow but unfortunately promised by her father to sad sack Thurio. She obviously has zero interest in actually marrying Thurio, and she and Valentine have started making plans to run away together. 

In one day. Oh to be young and to feel love's keen sting. 

But then Proteus shows up and immediately falls for Silvia too. You know, the Proteus that just yesterday swore eternal love to Julia? Yeah. Same guy. He has like, a moment's pause over the fact that he's basically stabbing both Valentine, his best friend, and Julia, his eternal love, in the back, but no worries: he doesn't lose any sleep over it or anything.

Instead, he goes to Silvia's dad and spills the beans on Silvia's and Valentine's entire plan for elopement and gets his best friend banished from Milan. Classy. 

So Valentine is out wandering around in a forest (classic Shakespeare), and runs into a band of outlaws who decide to make him their leader because they're actually a bunch of standup guys and Valentine is the most upstanding of all standup guys there ever was. 

Back in Verona, Julia is wasting away missing Proteus and decides to dress up like a boy and go to Milan to be with him. Because can we have Shakespeare without any crossdressing? No we cannot. She gets there just in time to discover her eternal love serenading his love to fair Silvia who, by the way, has not given him the time of day. 

Silvia may be my favorite Shakespearean heroine of all time. Definitely in recent years. 

But does Julia give Proteus the what-for and leave that little git forever? Obviously not. The only course of action is to become his pageboy and torture herself. Naturally. 

Proteus gives Sebastian—the boy name Julia has chosen for herself—her own ring to take to Silvia, but Silvia does give him the what-for and tells him exactly what he can do with himself. 

Did I mention we love Silvia?

Silvia finally runs away into the forest to get away from her awful dad and sad sack Thurio but is immediately taken prisoner by the outlaws. As they're taking her back to Valentine, Proteus "rescues" her, and continues laying it on thick. Unbeknownst to Proteus though, Valentine is watching the whole thing. When Silvia still won't give it up to him, Proteus makes to rape her at which point Valentine steps in and is all, "You treacherous bastard, how dare you?!" But Proteus immediately pedals it back and is all, "I'm the most disgusting person to have ever lived." And Valentine is all, "Oh good, you get it too."

But then...forgives him and wishes him a good life? 

Like, Valentine, come on. 

And then Julia swoons and everyone realizes she's Julia and not some boy named Sebastian, and Proteus suddenly remembers that she's his one true love and they get back together. 

Oh Julia. Grow a spine, sis. 

Then Silvia's dad and Thurio show up. Thurio claims Silvia for his wife, but Valentine is all, "Try me. I will end you where you stand." 

I'm sorry, where was this attitude when Proteus was literally about to rape her?? But I digress.

Thurio immediately backs off because hellooo: sad sack.

Silvia's dad finally realizes what a loser Thurio is and how great Valentine is and consents to Silvia's marriage to Valentine. He also un-banishes all the outlaws. And they all live happily ever after. Except I guess for Thurio. 

Like, what? I was really with Valentine until he didn't immediately castrate Proteus when Proteus tried to force himself on Silvia. And Julia, really?

But that's Shakespeare for ya. At least we got Crab. And one heroine who actually ends up with a good guy if we overlook his easy forgiveness of the most reprehensible human ever. I mean, no one's perfect. 

Next up on my mission to read Shakespeare's complete works: Coriolanus in August. Maybe I'll get a recap up before four whole months go by. No promises. 

A Word for Wednesday

I made an attempt at a grin. "You wouldn't like it in Russia."

"I'll hate it everywhere if I'm not in this war! Why do you think I kept saying there wasn't any war all winter? I was going to keep on saying it until two seconds after I got a letter from Ottawa or Chungking or some place saying, 'Yes, you can enlist with us.'" A look of pleased achievement flickered over his face momentarily, as though he had really gotten such a letter. "Then there would have been a war."

"Finny," my voice broke but I went on, "Phinehas, you wouldn't be any good in the war, even if nothing had happened to your leg."

A look of amazement fell over him. It scared me, but I knew what I said was important and right, and my voice found that full tone voices have when they are expressing something long-felt and long-understood and released at last. "They'd get you some place at the front and there'd be a lull in the fighting, and the next thing anyone knew you'd be over with the Germans or the Japs, asking if they'd like to field a baseball team against our side. You'd be sitting in one of their command posts, teaching them English. Yes, you'd get confused and borrow one of their uniforms, and you'd lend them one of yours. Sure, that's just what would happen. You'd get things so scrambled up nobody would know who to fight any more. You'd make a mess, a terrible mess, Finny, out of the war." 

~from A Separate Peace by John Knowles~

Let's Bust a Recap : A Separate Peace

Okay, here's the thing: A Separate Peace was the first book I finished this year, and to be completely 100 with you, it's what threw this whole blog into a tailspin. How do you recap something so good? I've faced this problem before, but after ten years of blogging, getting the flu at the end of last year, and all the real life in between: I just wasn't up for the challenge. 

And I'm still not up for it. But we're doing it anyway because this book deserves its corner on the blog. 

On its face, John Knowles' 1959 debut novel is a young man's coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of World War II at a New England prep school. At the beginning of this novel, Gene Forrester returns to The Devon School fifteen years after leaving it and reflects on his time there from the summer of 1942 to the summer of 1943. At that time of his life, he's sixteen and living at Devon with his best friend and roommate Finny. Quiet, intellectual Gene and carefree, athletic Finny are about as unlike as two boys can be, but they are the closest of friends and in the summer of '42 they form a secret society with their friends, Finny seemingly doing his best to shut out the war and cling to their childhood for a few more precious weeks while the rest of the boys are trying to figure out how to grow up and get to the war. Gene in particular is going through a difficult process of self-discovery in regards to his friendship with Finny, moving from an envy and one-sided rivalry with his chum to the realization of Finny's quality and wanting to emulate him. 

It's heartbreaking. Like, I think my heart actually broke while I was reading this book. The National Review called it "a masterpiece", and truly it is nothing short of one. Much of this book is autobiographical in nature, and I think that's what makes it so successful. John Knowles went to a New Hampshire prep school during WWII and served in the US Army Air Forces at the very end of the war after finishing school. None of his other novels garnered the same success as A Separate Peace or continued to live in the public consciousness like this one did. It's still assigned reading in some school curriculums. 

I actually drew this title out of my TBR Jar last year and read about half of it before setting it aside to read some library books before they were due. This was a book that I could read slowly because every word stayed with me no matter how much time passed between the times I opened it. I put A Separate Peace in the same class with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Optimist's Daughter: I want to convey how good it is, but I'm at a loss for words. I want to recommend it to you, but maybe not if you won't appreciate it. It's just brilliant. I'll be sharing an excerpt that broke me on Wednesday. Maybe that will give you a sense. 

How do you feel about coming-of-age stories?

Let's Bust a Recap : Women of the Word

Hi again! This is the second post this week for the second week in a row. Look at us go! Dare I say the blog is officially revived? I think I'm going to try to keep up this Monday/Thursday schedule until we're all caught up. But of course now that I've said it, you probably won't see another post around here for a month or so. (And if you're sitting there thinking, "There she goes, trying to hedge her bets"—you know me so well.) 

Anyway, today we're picking up another one of the books that's been sitting in my trusty book cart since I finished it last year: Women of the Word by Jen Wilkin. This Bible study aid published back in 2014 is Wilkin's first book and probably her most well-known. I know it's the one that has been recommended to me the most often. I read it over the course of two months last year—mid-August to mid-October—with three of my friends. This was a great book to read with company and there are helpful discussion questions at the end of each chapter for that exact purpose. 

Although I've had this book for several years and, as aforementioned, it's the Jen Wilkin book most often recommended to me, it's the one I've been most hesitant to read. I have long felt cautious about treating the Bible like a textbook or just another source of helpful information as opposed to what it actually is: the very Word of God to His people. Jen Wilkin's study method seemed intense to me (SPOILER ALERT: it is) which put it—in my mind—in the danger zone of making the Bible wholly academic. The perilous flip side of my own way of thinking is never studying the Bible at all. I certainly don't want to fall into that trap either. Jen Wilkin comes out swinging at the beginning of her book with the challenge that if we love God, we will want to know Him intimately. And the place we go to know Him is His Word. 

Touché, Jen. 

She also argues that you can't love something with your heart that you don't know with your mind.

Chalk another point up for Jen.

So right away she got me thinking and one of the conclusions I came to before even getting into the meat of the book is that if I say I love God with my heart, but I don't know Him—through His Word—with my mind, I'm prone to love a God of my own making, not the God who has actually revealed Himself to me in Scripture. 

All right then, Jen, let's get into it. 

She goes on to outline some common Bible study methods that aren't great, giving them amusing nicknames like The Pinball Approach, or The Magic 8-Ball Method, or The Personal Shopper. She then encourages her reader to take in the whole counsel of God. As a rule, tackle it expositionally rather than topically. 

Then she really gets into the nitty-gritty of Bible study. Some of this part of the book felt a bit like I was in an English Lit class, but it was a good review of how to read well. I appreciated her point that if we don't look at the context—Who wrote it? When was it written? To whom was it written? In what style was it written? Why was it written?—we are apt to misinterpret what we're reading. The Bible can't mean something to me that it didn't mean to its original audience. 

Although the process that Wilkin outlines and recommends is intensive and I have not used all of her methods; in reading Women of the Word I felt, if truth be told, affirmed in my own approach to Scripture. That is definitely not a credit to me. I'm very thankful that I was raised by parents who taught me the whole counsel of God—at home and from the pulpit—and encouraged me to read and study the Scriptures for myself. I particularly resonated with Wilkin's encouragement to treat Bible study like a savings account. Her advice is to keep reading and studying God's Word even when we don't understand it. Save that away. The Holy Spirit may illuminate a particularly tricky passage years later after we've read it hundreds of times. I know I've experienced this in my own study, and it was validating to hear her articulate my own experiences back to me.

She closes out her book with a chapter about teaching and common teaching pitfalls. I especially appreciated her warning about feminizing the Bible. It seems to be a trap that modern Christian writers can fall into and my radar is constantly up when I'm reading books by female authors I haven't encountered before. 

Ultimately though, I think the best thing Wilkin says in her entire book has to do with bathing our study of Scripture in prayer. 

"Without prayer, our study is nothing but an intellectual pursuit. With prayer, it is a means of communing with the Lord. Prayer is what changes our study from the pursuit of knowledge to the pursuit of God Himself."

Exactly right, Jen.  

You can read my reviews of the other Jen Wilkin books I've read here and here. How do you approach the Bible? Has your study of God's Word benefited from other books? And if yes, what books?

Let's Bust a Recap : The Nightingale

The Nightingale was not on my list for 2025, but it's been sitting on my shelf for years. I've lost count of the people in my real life who have personally recommended this book to me, not to mention the hordes on the internet who have raved about it since it came out. It's been a contender for my book list for the last three years at least, but it's never quite made the final cut. And then at the end of February, I happened to catch one of my Goodreads friends unboxing her copy of the brand new 10th anniversary edition on one of her social media accounts. 

What?! The Nightingale is already ten years old? That can't be! But sure enough, a quick Google search revealed to me that this internationally best-selling book was published in February of 2015 and after doing a little recall of my own, I've had a copy sitting on my shelf for at least seven of those ten years. I did not think twice: I went straight to my shelf, pulled down my copy, and sat down to start reading. I must have had at least eight other books in progress, but I was immediately swept away into WWII occupied France.

"If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: 

In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are."

This is the opening line of Kristin Hannah's powerful novel of two sisters and the very different choices they make during the course of Word War II. Vianne, married with a small daughter, is living a quiet, comfortable life in a small village before her husband is conscripted and eventually taken as a prisoner of war. Her younger sister Isabelle has been in and out of finishing schools, and as the Germans occupy France, her father sends her to Vianne in the country, but Isabelle is hungry to take an active role in the resistance movement. Fiery Isabelle can't understand her sister's quiet seeming acceptance of their new reality, especially when a German officer is billeted in Vianne's home. As the sisters' paths diverge, we follow each of them along their impossible journeys to cope with the war and watch them grapple with how to make sense of and live with integrity in the midst of such inconceivable evil. While their decisions take them in very different directions, both display heroic bravery in the heartbreaking circumstances they find themselves in.

And wow. What a story. I couldn't put The Nightingale down, and neither could my mom, and then neither could my dad. Hannah based the Isabelle character on a Belgian woman named Andrée de Jongh and the Vianne character on countless French women who put themselves in harm's way to save others. Her thorough research lent an authenticity to her story that broke my heart several times over. My parents and I discussed at length the impossible situations people found themselves in during the war and how they coped with it all. It boggles my mind to this day the depravity that humankind is capable of and how so many people during the war couldn't believe the things that were happening were even possible, much less that those things would happen to them. 

The content of this story is hard to stomach—at one point I was actually hyperventilating I was so upset, and my dad called me after he finished admitting that it made him cry—but the book is so well-written and the story so compelling that it isn't any wonder The Nightingale turned Kristin Hannah into a household name despite the fact she's been putting out a new novel every year or two since 1991. I fully understand why my friends have all been pestering me to read her work. As it happens, I've collected four of her other books since the massive success of The Nightingale, but The Nightingale is the first I've read. Upon finishing the book, my mom immediately borrowed Winter Garden and read that one too. 

After we had all finished it, I asked my parents which they would choose if they had to recommend either The Nightingale or All the Light We Cannot See (another novel set in occupied France during WWII). My mom couldn't decide, but my dad immediately said The Nightingale. Safe to say, we all would recommend both of these books without question. As the saying goes, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" and books like these help us remember. 

Have you read any of Kristin Hannah's books? Which one should I read next?

Let's Bust a Recap : A House Without Windows

Alright, after recapping my most recently read book on Monday, we're taking it all the way back to the book that's been waiting the longest for a recap. I read A House Without Windows in August last year after drawing it out of the TBR Jar. I picked this book up at my local library's annual sale a few years back when they were doing their $5 box day, and I have no idea when I actually would have gotten around to reading it if I hadn't pulled this title out of my TBR Jar last year. Much like I approached The Beekeeper of Aleppo with a bit of trepidation, I faced the opening sentences of A House Without Windows with some apprehension. What are the odds I pull two books featuring areas known for ongoing conflict and unrest? But that's what happened and as it turned out, I spoke too soon when I said we should all read The Beekeeper of Aleppo instead of The Kite Runner. A House Without Windows is the more appropriate replacement due to the fact that both books are written by Afghan American doctors and feature Afghani stories. Consider this my official revision of my original statement and wholehearted endorsement that we should all be reading Nadia Hashimi instead of Khaled Hosseini. (And no, I will never let this go: I hated The Kite Runner so much.)

A House Without Windows was published in 2016 and is Hashimi's third international best-seller. In the opening pages, we meet Zeba who is found in a catatonic state, covered in her husband's blood, next to his body with a hatchet in his back. She is immediately taken to Kabul's women's prison, and her young children are taken to her husband's family. We also meet idealistic Yusuf, an Afghan-born but American-raised lawyer ready to return to his native home and do some good there. When he is assigned Zeba's case, his client is nothing like what he expects and when she won't speak to him, he doesn't know how to handle her case. As Zeba slowly befriends other women at the prison, many of them there for "love crimes", they begin to wonder if she has her mother's power of jadu, and they start to confide their hopes for their futures in her. As Yusuf struggles to get to the bottom of what really happened to Zeba's husband Kamal, he also has to contend with his American sense of justice and face the reality that he may not be able to bring any meaningful change to his war-torn homeland.

This story was beautiful and heart-wrenching all at once. Hashimi deftly weaves together the many threads in her narrative in a gentle way that opens the reader's eyes to the plight of Afghani women without dragging you down into miry despair. I was intrigued by the murder mystery aspect which kept me turning the pages right to the end, and I appreciated the way Hashimi ended on a hopeful note without compromising the reality of life for women in Afghanistan. While the actual details of the murder are hard to stomach, Hashimi handles her difficult content delicately with a skilled hand. This story has stayed with me since turning the final page several months ago. 

Reading A House Without Windows and The Beekeeper of Aleppo last year really broadened my horizons. Coming face to face with the realities women contend with in these conflict-ridden regions made me so profoundly grateful for my own reality of growing up in the United States where I am free and respected as a human being, equal to the other humans around me. These are the reasons I try to diversify my reading, and those instincts were rewarded by these two excellent novels. I highly recommend both. I even bought Hashimi's debut novel on a recent trip to my favorite secondhand bookstore, and I look forward to reading it soon.

Why do you read? What books have opened your eyes to something you will probably never experience in your own life?

Let's Bust a Recap : Franklin Pierce

Hello there! It's June which means 2025 is nearly halfway over, and if we don't start busting out some of these recaps soon, I fear this blog may never recover. Including this slim biography on our 14th president, I have no less than twelve books sitting in my book cart waiting for recaps before I can re-shelve them and move on with my life so let's get cracking, shall we?

Even though I was determined to get to Pierce last year and even started reading this paltry biography in September, I didn't get past the first chapter and ended up having to start completely over a couple weeks ago. That means I didn't make any progress on my goal of reading through the U.S. presidents last year. Oy. But we dust ourselves off and keep trying. I was determined to finish Franklin Pierce by the end of May and I just barely eked it out Saturday evening. 

Which also means that I'm sitting here ignoring the eleven other books (five of them from last year) that have been waiting for recaps longer and filling you in on my most recently completed reading endeavor before I forget everything I just learned about Franklin Pierce. Which wasn't much. Even though after reading Eisenhower's tiny biography on Zachary Taylor I determined to avoid The American Presidents series from here on out, I unfortunately could not find an affordable option for Peter Wallner's two-volume series on Pierce and had to settle for Michael F. Holt's scant rendering of our 14th president instead. 

While this is technically a cradle-to-grave biography of Franklin Pierce (which meets my criteria for this particular life goal), it was more an argument for Holt's thesis that without a strong opposition, a political party is doomed to fracture internally and become its own worst enemy. For the majority of this 154-page biography, I didn't get much insight into Franklin Pierce at all and felt that Holt focused too much on the entire political landscape of the time rather than on the specific man he was tasked with writing about. The final chapter of the book covering Pierce's life after his presidency was by far the most interesting and illuminating. 

Franklin Pierce was born in 1804 to American Revolutionary war hero and two-time New Hampshire governor Benjamin Pierce. After getting an education in the law at Bowdoin College in Maine and Northampton Law School in Massachusetts, he quickly ascended in local and state politics before moving on to the U.S. House of Representatives and finally the Senate. He then retired from politics and after a brief (and embarrassing) stint as a colonel in the Mexican-American War, he left the national scene altogether for nearly ten years, practicing law back home in New Hampshire.

Then during the 1852 Democratic National Convention, Pierce's name came up as a dark horse contender when no one could agree on one of the bigger name candidates. Ultimately, Pierce and Alabama's William R. King were chosen to run for president and vice president on the Democratic ticket. Even though Pierce's name had been sunken in political obscurity for the last ten years prior to the 1852 presidential election, he easily won running on a platform committed to upholding the Compromise of 1850 signed into law during Fillmore's presidency. His running-mate King ended up dying shortly after they were sworn in meaning Pierce served his one presidential term with no acting VP (which, let's be honest, isn't really that big of a deal since American vice presidents really don't do all that much). He is our country's only president from New Hampshire to date.

As for his presidency: it was a disaster. Franklin Pierce was a likable guy and he liked to be liked which isn't a particularly helpful trait when it comes to making tough decisions or taking a hardline stance on issues of national importance. His main objective as top dog of the land was maintaining party unity which was pretty much impossible at this point in our nation's history. You would think that by this point, the American political landscape would have split along sectional divides: the Northern anti-slavery contingent against the Southern states' rights contingent. But in 1852, we still had the Democrats spanning all settled states and their main opposition the Whigs spanning all settled states (with a lot of smaller parties sprinkled throughout with their own pet platforms). In trying to hold all the factions of Dems together, Pierce effectively pissed everyone off and started that sectional split all the major politicians of the day were so desperately trying to avoid in the name of keeping the country unified. Pierce used his presidential patronage to divide jobs up evenly among all the aforementioned Democratic factions which blew up in his face. He threw his weight behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act which effectually repealed the Missouri Compromise, earning him the accusation of being a slavery-loving doughface. By the time his term came to an end, he really hadn't accomplished much of anything and in his final annual message to Congress he bitterly contended that it wasn't his fault the country was such a mess. He was not renominated by his party, and he spent his remaining twelve years on earth traveling with his wife abroad, farming in New England, and spending time with friends. 

As for his personal life, he married Jane Means Appleton in 1834 and by all appearances, loved her and took care of her until her death in 1863. She was a frail, sickly woman often suffering with bouts of tuberculosis. They had three sons together but none of them survived past childhood, their third son being killed in a train accident—in the seat behind them!—at the age of of eleven. Jane hated politics and spent most of her time as First Lady living as an isolated recluse. As I mentioned, Frank Pierce was a highly likable person and his friends and family and even his presidential cabinet seemed to genuinely love and respect him, and he earned the lifelong loyalty of those whom he was close to. Some of his dearest friends included American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and Confederate president Jefferson Davis. All in all, I think Pierce was a good guy who just wasn't cut out for politics and certainly served his political career during an impossible time in American politics. He struggled with alcoholism all his life and finally succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver in 1869 at the age of 64. 

As we move one step closer to the man who is arguably America's most famous president, Abraham Lincoln, I found it interesting that Pierce tried to remain neutral and stay out of the press about Lincoln's administration but ended up publicly airing his criticisms when Lincoln trampled the civil rights of Democrat Clarence Vallandigham. Many in the North branded Pierce a traitor to the Union and a mob stormed his home when he didn't raise the flag in a gesture of mourning after Lincoln's death. I'm approaching the most heated and politically charged time in my nation's history in my personal read-through of the American presidents, and it's getting tense. 

Next up is James Buchanan who is considered by literally everyone to be our nation's very worst president, bar none. I'm sincerely hoping to read his biography by the end of the year, but we'll see what happens.