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The Tempest

William Shakespeare

Start date: May 23, 2024

Finish date: June 26, 2024

Why we're reading this: The Tempest is Varsity Cinema Book Club's June selection! This book club will be held in partnership with…more
[close] The Tempest is Varsity Cinema Book Club's June selection! This book club will be held in partnership with The Varsity Cinema, located at 1207 25th St, on Wednesday 6/26 at 8:30 PM. Visit our website or call 515-283-4152 for more details.

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Apr 17, 2019 Celia Buell (semi hiatus) rated it really liked it

Shelves: family, british-author, published-before-i-was-born, romance, class-differences, play, multiple-perspectives, written-by-a-man, fiction, fantasy

Review 9/12/22
The Tempest is my third or fourth book that I've revisited since high school. I kind of accidentally read this last night for a class where we didn't really have to read the whole thing, or at all. But since I did read it, I figure I'll review it.

I'll make it clear that I'm not a huge fan of Shakespeare in general. However, The Tempest is probably my favorite of his works that I've actually read. The class I'm taking is looking at the history of magic as a concept from Medieval Eur Review 9/12/22
The Tempest is my third or fourth book that I've revisited since high school. I kind of accidentally read this last night for a class where we didn't really have to read the whole thing, or at all. But since I did read it, I figure I'll review it.

I'll make it clear that I'm not a huge fan of Shakespeare in general. However, The Tempest is probably my favorite of his works that I've actually read. The class I'm taking is looking at the history of magic as a concept from Medieval Europe to the implications today, and we were asked to look into Medieval literature / theater that includes magic. I figured I'd look at this one (and somehow in the process ended up downloading and reading the whole thing) because I already had some familiarity with it from when it was an assigned text in high school.

I enjoyed looking at this one with the lens of this history of magic perspective. It brings up a lot of questions about Prospero and the island. There's a question of who has magic and how they got it. There's the whole Sycorax arc, which is left intentionally vague, and the relationship between Prospero and Ariel, which I think is worth exploring when we think about who had magic first. I'm also really interested in the question of whether Prospero was exiled for the use of magic, or whether his magic appeared after he had stayed there for some time.

In terms of the story itself, I also like the idea that it's not about anyone exacting revenge, and is almost about forgiveness, or at least about making amends. I question Prospero's end results in bringing them together, especially with Miranda and Ferdinand. Was this the plan from the beginning? I enjoy that Shakespeare was intentionally vague about a lot of aspects of the story.

I'm glad I revisited this one, even if I didn't have to and I stayed up way too late because of it. I enjoyed coming back to this one and seeing all the things I missed now that I know a bit more about how to read it and a lot of the gaps have been filled in from high school class discussions. Again, this is one of the few Shakespeare plays that I've actually enjoyed reading (as opposed to seeing performed - that's another story) and I would look forward to seeing it performed at some point.
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Review 4/17/19
I can't believe I've never made this comparison before, but reading Shakespeare is actually a lot like reading texts in Spanish. I try really hard to understand them, and I think I would like them if I could, but it's often really hard to read the story at the same time my mind is working out the translations.

The Tempest is a book I tried really hard to like, and I thought I would. It's only the second of Shakespeare's comedies, and maybe the fifth or his plays, that I've read. However, I won't sugarcoat it: there was a lot of muddling. It was The Tempest that truly made me think about the connection to reading in Spanish, because it is the first one where I realized I was trying to read a book in a "language" (of sorts) that I can speak and write okay in, but have trouble "translating" in my head while also trying to make sense of the story.

I imagine that when I read this one in the future, I will like it a lot more, but at this point, I had to rush through it for school because I've been really behind, and I didn't exactly have the time to appreciate it like I have with other books, or even to read it as thoroughly as I've been able to do with other texts from school. ...more

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Apr 04, 2024 Abigail Westbrook rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2024-books-read

I’ve read a simplified kids’ version of this story but this was my first time through the original. I listened to a dramatic reading which helped me understand some of it better, but they overdid the voice filters and sound effects in places which made some of the dialogue hard to catch. Sometime I need to hear it again while following along in a paper copy.

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