Straightheads (Closure) (2007)
Movie Watch
There is instant chemistry between Alice (Gillian Anderson), a businesswoman, and Adam (Danny Dyer),...
Pete Buttigieg recommended My Name is Red in Books (curated)
Caitlin Moran recommended A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Books (curated)
Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands
Book
'This is a miracle of a book' George Lamming 'Compelling. Stuart Hall's story is the story of an...
Miss Purdys Class
Book
A tale of hardship and social injustice, Miss Purdy's Class by Annie Murray is a heartfelt saga with...
The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
Podcast
Leaders are learners. The best leaders never stop working to make themselves better. As Kobe Bryant...
Awix (3310 KP) rated The Dig (2021) in Movies
Feb 6, 2021 (Updated Feb 6, 2021)
Really a film of two halves: the first part, which is very quiet and still and all about figures in a landscape with Vaughan Williams-esque music playing, I found was much engaging than the second, which is not particularly focused and turns into a bit of a soap opera (there's a forbidden romance, terminal illness, political squabbling over who gets to run the dig and keep the treasure, etc, etc). Decent performances from a strong cast and it looks good in a fairly cinematic way, but by the end it seemed to me that archaeology in general and Sutton Hoo in particular had rather been forgotten about, which seemed like a shame.
**✿❀ Maki ❀✿** (7 KP) rated Othello in Books
May 3, 2018
See, when I was seventeen, my brothers and I had to move to a completely different state. I was going into my senior year, and my new school didn't offer a real Honors English class for seniors - the only option available to me would have been to go into AP English which, in that particular school, would have ONLY prepared me to take the AP exam. It wasn't actually an English class.
I wasn't very enthusiastic about that fact, so I was put into a tiny 11th grade Honors English class instead. (There were ten of us - eight girls, and two boys.)
Things went fairly well, considering, until we came to the Shakespeare semester. The play the teacher chose was [b:Hamlet|1420|Hamlet|William Shakespeare|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1351051208s/1420.jpg|1885548].
I'd spent a semester and a half on Hamlet when I was in 11th grade, so I was already weary when the choice was made. After the first few days of reading the play aloud in class resulted in an entire five lines of Hamlet being covered, I was desperate. For the first time ever, I was ready to bash my head into my desk in an English class in order to relieve the boredom.
I approached my English teacher, and explained that I'd already done Hamlet, and the slow pace the class was taking wasn't really working for me. I offered to read another Shakespeare play in place of Hamlet, and said that I'd even still take the Hamlet test at the end of the semester to prove that I was serious. Because he was an awesome English teacher, he agreed, and told me to just get back to him to let him know which play I was going to read on my own.
Guess which one I picked?
Compared to retreading Hamlet for the seventh time, Othello was a breath of fresh air. Othello saved my brain that semester.
In light of that, I absolutely adored Othello.
*shrugs*
Like I said, completely circumstantial. I'll have to reread it at some point, to see how it holds up when it isn't the only thing standing between me and three months of mind-numbing boredom.
Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford
Book
While the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, Flora Thompson's much-loved portrait of life in the...