Always seeking book recommendations

'[Shakespeare] certainly read the Bible, in the Genevan version of 1560, from an early age. He certainly read, all his life, everything he could get his hands on. He played games, fished, hunted, observed rural life as it has rarely been observed by anyone else.' From John Berryman's Shakespeare lectures

Shakespeare wrote the blueprint for every messy human emotion you’re currently feeling, and he did it in iambic pentameter with better one-liners than any modern TV show. He understood toxic relationships better than your group chat. Romeo and Juliet is just “they weren’t even that compatible, but the dopamine hit was insane.” Othello is the original “he’s a little too jealous” story. Macbeth is ambition + bad advice + consequences. Hamlet is overthinking until you ruin everything. These aren’t dusty old plays. They’re case studies on how people actually behave when pride, love, fear, or power is involved. His language is still doing work in your vocabulary whether you know it or not. “Wild goose chase,” “break the ice,” “heart of gold,” “wear your heart on your sleeve,” “the world is your oyster.” He either coined or popularized hundreds of phrases we still use. Reading him isn’t about decoding old English for its own sake. It’s about watching someone invent the tools we still reach for when we need to describe something complicated. The real reason to read him: the characters feel more psychologically modern than a lot of people writing right now. They contradict themselves. They know what they should do and do the opposite. They rationalize. They perform. They get in their own way. Four hundred years later, the technology and the slang changed. The internal conflicts didn’t. You don’t have to start with the densest ones. Try a good production (or even a modern adaptation) of something like Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, or Twelfth Night first. The language is elevated, not impenetrable once your ear adjusts. A solid annotated edition or a performance helps. The payoff is language that still hits harder than most of what gets written today, plus a sharper sense of why people do the things they do. The plays are short. The insights are long.

God Bless England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

'Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure.' Emil Cioran

"Shakespeare had a long career…and for the first many of these years he little resembled the major canonical figure of English writing he becomes." lithub.com/what-john-berryma…

The Shakespeare canon may not be quite as settled as we thought. New research identifies Shakespeare as the principal author of Edward III and Marlowe as his collaborator. The old rivals may have been partners after all. @loughnrv @MarloweProject 🎭 theguardian.com/culture/2026…

Chris Pratt just described the exact wall almost everyone hits trying to read the Bible. Genesis is fine. The Gospels are fine. Then you reach Leviticus and Numbers, and your brain wanders off 4 seconds in. His fix wasn’t more discipline. It was a different format. He’s an auditory learner, so he stopped reading and started listening: Hallow’s Bible in a Year, one episode a day, Genesis to Revelation in 365 days. He finished the whole thing and says it totally strengthened his walk with Jesus. Read it, listen to it, hear it in church. The Word doesn’t care how it reaches you. It only matters that it does. Have you ever made it all the way through?

"School of Athens" but make it about books.

Follow Jesus. Smash idols. Invite everyone to do the same.

Can I ask a dumb question? Why do so many people say that Hamlet actually goes mad at times, when he tells us early he that he is going to put on an "antic disposition"? I'm reading the play right now with the assumption that everything that looks mad is feigned. You could even take this hard case. Act two ends with a somewhat hopeful soliloquy on Hamlet's part. After he castigates himself for cowardice, he settles on the Mousetrap idea wherein he hopes to catch the conscience of the king by observing the king observe an imitation of his alleged murder. So, Hamlet has a path forward, something to actually do. The next time we see him on stage in Act Three, we get "To be or not to be..." This seems to be a paradoxical return to the mood of the two soliloquies that preceded the more hopeful one. Why? Well, couldn't he suspect that he is being watched? He saw through Guild and Rose with startling alacrity, and given that Polonius and Claudius think that the solution to many problems is to spy on people, it seems likely that Hamlet is well aware that Denmark is a kind of surveillance state. Could he have suspected that Polonius or Claudius are listening or at least that agents of theirs are listening? To make an inquiry into suicide with such eloquence seems like precisely the kind of thing which might baffle and perplex those who are surveilling him.