Whistlestop Blog


The best theater with the best seats

The best theater with the best seats

What happened to the fun of reading plays?  You the reader are the director, producer, actor, and special effects wizard.  A play is not read by you; it is staged.  It is the ultimate forgiving dress rehearsal:  you do get to go back and get the lines right as soon as you realize where the scene is going or what hidden motivations made a particular character say this and not that at the crucial moment.  The stage manager is magical and can bring about anything you imagine.  No boring prosy rambles (be skeptical of overly controlling stage descriptions by playwrights), no death march through chapter after chapter of sequential plot development.  Drama must be fast, efficient, breathtaking, heart-stopping (I almost wrote "heart-stomping"), pow!

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Resuming George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical

Resuming George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical

Felix Holt, the Radical was one of the those books that got put on hold or on the back burner or set aside as I moved on to other books, other projects.  I had been enjoying it, as I always do with a George Eliot novel, but . . . .  So last Fall I picked it up after years of suspended animation and determined to finish it.  I am very glad I did.

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Why I read Agatha Christie

Why I read Agatha Christie

Recently I listened to Hugh Fraser read the unabridged Peril at End House.  He is the actor who superbly portrayed Col. Hastings in the A&E Poirot series many years ago, and he is a wonderful voice actor.  After years of treating Christie's works as a buffet table to be ranged over as the mood or a theme struck me, I am reading them in chronological order, and here I was at Peril at End House (1932). 

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