A Midsummer Night’s Dream

by William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
* * * *
Content: 5/5
Poetic Mastery: 5/5
Literary Truth: 4/5

Quince, Bottom, Snout, and Snug?

— Read the boobies in Act 1, Scene 2 | Act 3, Scene 1 | Act 5 —

I love Shakespeare’s morons!

Strange Pilgrims

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
* * *
Content 4/5
Poetic Mastery 4/5
Literary Truth 3/5

A collection of short stories that cohere around the theme of Latin Americans displaced in Europe, Strange Pilgrims offers 12 ejoyable tales of aging, supersitition, childhood, adolescence, pilgrimage, human nature, and the difference between Latin America’s people and and Europe’s people. A few stories were clearly written in Garcia Marquez’s famed style “magical realism.”

This book was the inagural selection for our book “club” cleverly called Book Talk. While enjoyable to read, somehow this collection lacked impact for me. My favorite moments in the work were the enviably vital relationships of the characters in “The Saint” and the horrific drama of “‘I Only Came to Use the Phone.'”