Review of 'Shakespeare Saved My Life Ten Years In Solitary With The Bard' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
This book took me forever to get through, it seems like. Not because it's a difficult work in the strictest sense, but because it was so banal and so poorly structured. For more specific problems I had with the work, I'll paste my updates:
Okay, six chapters in and the writing is remarkably amateurish for an English professor.
These "chapters" are so arbitrary...is this so the author didn't have to find a way to transition between sections?
Chapter 30, and I've finally figured out what this reminds me of: like a magazine article. A really long magazine article, stitched together.
Chapter 40. Her lack of peer-reviewed material was a barrier to tenure? I can't say I'm shocked, if this is the level of her discourse.
"we've been hearing that message all our lives: 'If you do this, then that will happen.'" "Pronouns, Larry!" The English teacher in me reminded him …
This book took me forever to get through, it seems like. Not because it's a difficult work in the strictest sense, but because it was so banal and so poorly structured. For more specific problems I had with the work, I'll paste my updates:
Okay, six chapters in and the writing is remarkably amateurish for an English professor.
These "chapters" are so arbitrary...is this so the author didn't have to find a way to transition between sections?
Chapter 30, and I've finally figured out what this reminds me of: like a magazine article. A really long magazine article, stitched together.
Chapter 40. Her lack of peer-reviewed material was a barrier to tenure? I can't say I'm shocked, if this is the level of her discourse.
"we've been hearing that message all our lives: 'If you do this, then that will happen.'" "Pronouns, Larry!" The English teacher in me reminded him to be more specific in his use of language. "What's 'this' and what's 'that'?" ...that's not pronoun misuse. "This" and "that" AREN'T PRONOUNS. I remind the reader that this is a person with a doctorate IN ENGLISH.
Chapter 62: "students and professors alike complained about the minimal availability of books and limited access to computer materials. Personally, I saw that as a plus: the Shakespeare text I assigned had no footnotes, nor could the students access Internet sites like Spark Notes that on-campus students often leaned on as a crutch." Piss right off with that. Shakespeare notes are USEFUL and NECESSARY.
Chapter 70: "At sixty thousand words, Larry's workbook was longer than my PhD dissertation. And, in one important respect, it was also better. Doctoral dissertations are a composite of others' ideas, with footnoted material almost as long as the text itself. In Larry's work, all sixty thousand words represented his own original thinking on these plays, without the crutch of professional scholar's writing." ...what does she have against using other people's work as a launching point for one's own? She's really defensive about this kind of thing.
Honestly, the reader's group notes were more interesting than the content of this book. If I didn't have this marked for Popsugar's reading challenge, I would not have finished it.