I first read this play in high school, and I hardly remembered a thing when I thought about it. The second time around was much more interesting :)

The play has four characters: Tom, who is the narrator, his mother Amanda, his sister Laura, and a “gentleman caller” named Jim who works with Tom at a shoe warehouse. Amanda is an overbearing mother and a queen of the guilt trips. She reminds me a little of Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice in that she is overly concerned with finding her daughter a husband to take care of her. Laura, however, is nothing like Elizabeth Bennet. She has none of the confidence and social graces, and instead becomes sick with fright when anyone looks at her for too long. Laura is content to sit at home with her mother and tend to her glass menagerie of animal figurines, though she knows her mother worries she will turn into an old maid.

One day, Tom decides to invite a co-worker home to meet his sister. It’s not because he wants to, but because his mother wants him to and he can’t stand arguing with her about it anymore. The gentleman caller turns out to be a boy both Tom and Laura went to high school with. He’s charming, and able to draw Laura out of her shell for a while — a sign that it is possible for her to meet someone if she would only try. Of course, Jim and Laura falling in love and getting married would be a much too easy way to end the play, and instead Tom continues the pattern of abandonment and leaves his mother and Laura to fend for themselves and become old maids together. Not exactly your happy ending!

No, if ever there was a play about the ultimate dysfunctional family, this would be it. Tom is stuck taking care of his mother and sister because his father abandoned them, Amanda is stuck in the glory days of her youth, and Laura is stuck at home, hiding from the world because of her low confidence in herself. All of them want better, but none of them are able to go for it.

It might sound like a melancholic, depressing read, and it is, but it’s still entertaining. A good, quick read. I enjoyed it much more this second time around.

Thirteen-year-old Mary and her eight-year-old brother Peter are the only survivors of a plane crash in the middle of the Australian desert. They should stay near the plane and wait for someone to come find them, but it’s hot and there’s no food or water nearby and they do not know how long it will be until someone comes for them. Instead, they decide they will walk towards Adelaide and search for food and water as they go. Along the way, they meet with a young Aboriginal boy on a solo trek of his own across the desert. For the Aboriginal boy, the trek is a rite of passage — to survive is a testimony of his manhood to his tribe.

Peter recognizes that the Aboriginal boy is their only hope of survival, but Mary is wary of the naked, dark-skinned boy. She has been raised in a society where people wear clothes and treat each other differently, and she is not used to the way the Aboriginal boy looks so curiously at her. She is cautious around him, careful to keep her distance and watch out for her brother. The Aboriginal thinks the children are odd, with their strange clothes and pale skin and hair. They speak a different language and come from a world he can’t even begin to imagine, but he recognizes that they are the same as him in one critical way — they are all trying to escape death out in the harsh desert. These strange children need his help, so the Aboriginal boy decides he will help them cross the desert, at least to the valley of waters underneath the earth where there is no shortage of food or water to aid them the rest of their way.

A story of survival and death, this is a well-written novel that puts the reader in the middle of the Australian desert with its beautiful description of the land, the vegetation and the wildlife. I enjoyed it.

I decided to reread this classic Shakespearean play while listening to an unabridged audiobook of it at the same time. When I took a Shakespeare course in University, I found that watching the plays while I read along helped me to understand them better. I particularly liked the taped stage productions of the Royal Shakespeare Society, which I borrowed from my library. I’d watch and read along and seeing the actors’ expressions helped me figure out the language much better than those little footnotes at the bottom of the page do when reading. This time, however, I got a dramatized audiobook of the play from iTunes (with multiple actors and lots of sound effects, which really helps) and listened along as I read. I realized that there is really no way to just listen to a play and not read along — you’d get so lost in the characters and trying to figure out who was speaking and entering and exiting the scenes without all the stage directions to guide you. So I definitely wouldn’t recommend downloading Shakespeare onto your iPod unless you intend to read along with it as well — much better to watch the play performed exactly to the script if you don’t want to read it yourself.

Macbeth is a Scottish nobleman who has earned glowing recommendations from his fellow countrymen as a great soldier on the fields. On his way home from a battle, Macbeth and his fellow nobleman Banquo come upon three witches who make prophecies to the two men: Macbeth, already Thane (Lord) of Glamis will soon earn the title of Thane of Cawdor, and become King of Scotland shortly after. They also tell that that though Macbeth will become King, none of his own children will succeed him on the throne — that is destined for Banquo’s lineage.

Upon returning to the King’s castle, one of the witches’ prophecies immediately comes true: King Duncan, so impressed with all he has heard about Macbeth, names him Lord of Cawdor for his brave service to the country. Believing that the rest of the witches’ prophecies must also come true, Macbeth and his ruthless wife, Lady Macbeth, become impatient for the third prophecy to come true. They decide they will murder King Duncan when he comes to stay with them at their castle, and make it seem as if the King’s own sons had each schemed to murder their father so that they may take up his place on the throne. When Duncan is found murdered, the sons flee in fear for their own lives, not realizing they have only supported the story that they had brought about the murder of their own father by running away. With the murdered King’s sons fled, Macbeth is named King of Scotland.

With this new title crowned on him, Macbeth becomes jealous of the witches’ last prophecy — that no child of Macbeth’s shall rule Scotland, but one of Banquo’s will. Macbeth decides to hire killers to murder Banquo and his son so that the witches’ last prophecy can not come true. When the murderers kill Banquo, but fail to capture his son, Fleance, Macbeth returns to the witches to learn more about his fate. The witches tell him that a war will be brought to his doorstep, but no man borne of a woman can kill him, leaving Macbeth with a sense of security that he will live a long life, during which he can no doubt come up with some plan to prevent Fleance and any of his children from assuming the throne.

With each killing, Macbeth falls further and further into madness. He shows remorse in the beginning with Duncan’s murder, but with his cruel wife by his side, and power corrupting his mind, he commits more and more murders to keep himself on the throne. His ambition and overconfidence soon will lead him to his downfall as the rest of the noblemen begin to see what evils Macbeth has committed, and rise up against him to revenge their families and take back their country.

Ben is a young college student just a few semesters away from graduating and becoming a geologist. He agrees to work as a guide and take a businessman and hobby hunter named Madec out into the desert near his hometown to hunt the elusive bighorn sheep. Though Ben doesn’t agree with Madec’s desire to shoot the bighorns, which are slowly dwindling in numbers, he is a poor man with no family and he needs to earn money to continue his studies.

The two men set out on a week-long hunting trip, and when Madec sees a movement off in the distance through the barrel of his .358 Magnum rifle and shoots, he tells Ben he saw the antlers of the bighorn before he made the shot. They go towards the sheep to collect it and bring it home, only to discover that it was no sheep Madec shot: it was an old prospector, shot dead straight through the chest by Madec’s rifle.

Ben says he knows it was an accident and that the authorities will understand, but Madec doesn’t want to take any chances with the law and tries to work out a deal with Ben: he’ll pay for the rest of his schooling if they just bury the body and tell no one about the accident. But Ben refuses and insists on doing what is right. As he turns towards the Jeep to get a blanket to bundle the body in, Madec takes Ben’s Hornet rifle away from him. Then, with both guns in hand, Madec gives Ben two choices: he can shoot him dead now, or Ben can take all his clothes and his shoes off and try to make it out of the desert with no food or water. Either way, Madec knows Ben will die, but if Ben takes the second choice, Madec will get the sadistic pleasure of spending the next few days hunting Ben through the desert, making sure he has no chance of making it out alive.

Ben’s survival instincts set in and he takes choice number two. He flees from Madec with nothing but his undershorts to protect him from the scorching sun. Over the next few days, Madec follows Ben as he tries desperately to escape him and find water to survive the trek across the desert. But nothing seems to go Ben’s way — any time he gets too close to anything that could help him, Madec drives him away from it with a spray of bullets aimed near his feet. What follows is a thrilling survival tale as Ben desperately attempts to save himself while dehydration and the sun and rocky desert strip his body apart — all while Madec watches him dying a slow, painful death.

This book was absolutely riveting and suspenseful — there is not much dialog, but full of raw and often-cringing description of Ben’s painful fight to survive his mad hunter and the elements that seem to work against him every step of the way. An adventure about one boy’s sheer courage and determination to survive even against a sadistic and calculating man bent on destroying him to save his own reputation. A fantastic, quick read.