Books are Friends

As a freshman in high school, I took Brit Lit this year. We read A Tale of Two Cities and Lord of the Flies over the summer, and I absolutely could not stand (or understand) ATTC, and LOTF was not much better. We started off the year with Beowulf, which was decent but a little to predictable for my taste. Next, we read many of the Canterbuy Tales stories, including The Miller's Tale, The Reeve's Tale, and many more; they were okay, but a little too boring. After this, we read A Midsummer Night's Dream; this was too romantic and seemingly unplotted to me. Then we read Macbeth after out midterm, and it was my favorite Shakespeare; it was actually somewhat like a story I would read. I had also seen a play with my friend at the local college beforehand, so we kind of knew what was going on (the play was very interesting). Our final Shakespeare was Hamlet, which I liked more than AMND but less than Macbeth. Then we did a poetry unit, covering the poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; I really liked When We Two Parted by Byron. Then we read A Modest Proposal by Johnathan Swift, which was very well written, and we are now finishing out the year with Brave New World, which is okay so far; I am starting to like it more.

I've been reading this in my 9th grade Brit Lit class at school. It is okay, not one of my favorite Shakespeares, but it is okay. I can't understand Shakespearean, but my teacher explains it to us in modern terms (thank the gods!) Out of the four (impressive right? lol) that I have read, I'd have to say Macbeth was my favorite and Romeo and Juliet, which I read last year (in 8th grade), was my least favorite. I'm not a romance-novel person. But I liked Polonius's comic releif, until he got stabbed by Hamlet while behind the wall carpet. And Laertes's reaction to poor Ophelia's death (the sexual tension between her and Hamlet was real) was all like, "Oh, she drowned? Ah, oh well! Poor sis!" But he was all like, "Yeah, angry mob and I are gonna go raid the castle for my dad's body. Let's do this!" I'm not sure if I have a favorite character; I kinda liked Ophelia and Polonius.