Still Life with Iris

 

This was an ok children's play by Steven Dietz. Apparently, there are two versions of Still Life with Iris. One is shorter. That's what the library told me, and I went with the two act edition. This play is dreamlike. It's about a girl who lives in a place where they make everything in the world by night. All of your memories are kept in a coat and the girl loses hers. She is adopted into a family without her memories present. Yet she is determined to get back home to her original family. I originally had read Becky's New Car and liked it. I was more impressed with that one.  It stayed with me longer but this one was all right. 

The Merry Wives of Windsor

 

This was a pretty effective Shakespearean comedy. It's about Falstaff who tries to seduce two married women sending them the same letter. But the joke is on him for the women scheme to bring about his downfall. It's interesting how even the minor Shakespeare plays are worth reading. I bought a complete works two years ago and I'm surprised by how many I've read. I need to be more adventurous and go about reading the works like this which aren't as famous as say Romeo and Juliet. 

Hadriana in all my dreams

 

Goodreads raved about this during their Halloween reads. This certainly sounds like it would be awesome. A Haitian book about a woman who becomes a zombie on her wedding, and it talks about Vodou as well. I thought it was ok. I just wasn't wowed by it. Maybe I came in expecting more than I should have. The love story just wasn't compelling enough for me. I also thought it was trying too hard to shock at parts.

The Final Girl Support Group

 

Grady Hendrix is one of the best horror writers nowadays. I loved My Best Friend's Exorcism. This was good too, but I didn't embrace the characters like I did in My Best Friend's Exorcism. This book is pretty much like watching a slasher movie. It gets its genre down right.  It's about a group of women who have survived unspeakable violence. They're basically like the last woman standing in a slasher movie. They have been meeting at a support group together for years. That is until someone decides to take them out one by one. I got done with this book pretty quickly.  It was a page turner, but I wanted more. 

Becky's New Car

 

This was an ok play about a woman's mid-life crisis. Becky is a car salesman who takes up an affair after a wealthy man Walter enters her dealership. Her husband figures out the affair pretty quickly. Everyone gets affected by her actions even her twenty-six-year-old son whose life gets tangled unexpectedly with Walter's as well. Eventually a new car and a disappearance of Becky happens as well. It didn't change my life, but I finished it pretty quickly.     

Mary Rose

 

I was curious about J.M. Barrie's other work, so I read this play of his. It was charming and intriguing. It concerns a woman who disappeared during her childhood on an island. As an adult she goes to the island again with her husband and disappears once more. When Mary reappears, she hasn't aged. I read that Hitchcock wanted to a movie of this, but it didn't happen. Now that would have been interesting.

Animal Farm

 

I just thought this was ok as a teenager. I read it today at 39 and thought wow this book is something else. Frankly it's kind of eerie and entirely original. It concerns an animal farm. The animals rebel and start out free. By the end they are worse off than they were originally. The animals' commandments for example do not murder and not to use money all get broken eventually. The animals on the farm are pretty stupid as well just accepting the little phrases that get changed to each rule.  I have to admit murder happened way sooner than I expected. Napoleon is one jerk. I found the ending perfect and utterly creepy. It proves you can pack in just as much in a novella as you can in an epic. This was a statement on Russia and totalitarianism. George Orwell was one fantastic writer.