The Book of Air and Shadows

There is nothing like a canceled dentist appointment - canceled by them! - to make a few free hours feel like a gift. And these couple of hours, while I wait to collect my offspring from various sweaty, over-programed activities, are spent with the book I chose, The Book of Air and Shadows.

Laura Miller is a book critic of a magazine I like, Salon.com, and she happened to be the subject of an interview on summer reading as I was driving to the library. She recommended the new novel by Michael Gruber, but she mentioned his previous novel in passing, and used the name "Shakespeare" in it's description. I'm a fan of Shakespeare, so I grabbed it.

A bit disappointed at first, if only because it looms large and pompous in size and cover, as does the author in his photo.

But I'll be damned if I'm not having a blast with this thing. It is funny and smart and mysterious. It's a PostIt note kind of book, a habit I developed with The Braindead Megaphone and Space Vulture, sticking PostIts at lines I like. So now a quick break to bask in good writing and log a few of the memorable lines just from this past hour of reading:

"It was dated 1602, right after Hamlet was registered and a year earlier than the First Quarto, raising interesting questions: were the differences mere transcription errors or did they mean that the author had changed his play after it was performed? It was the sort of thing that generates multiple orgasms among the learned." "The Mishkin genes do not work and play will with others. They either dominate totally or leave the field in a huff. Thus I look exactly like my dad, the Jewish refrigerator carton, while my brother and sister are blondie rails, recruiting posters for the Hitlerjugend."

". . .[E]ven after I was offstage and even after we'd done our three performances in the orange-juice-smelling auditorium, I still felt inhabited by Telegin, and this was wonderful to me, that a made-up person created by a man long dead could in a sense displace my own personality." ". . .I would say that Shakespeare's famous powers of invention do not show well in the matter of plots. All but two of the plays are ripped off, sometimes blatantly, from prior sources; and it was a good thin for him they didn't have copyright in those days. We go to hear his plays for the language, just as we go to opera for the music; plot is secondary in both, trivial really, but - and contemporaries picked this up as well - there is no one like him for seizing something out of life and putting it on the stage."