Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon!

I don't read enough.

I write plenty; too much by some people's standards. I can't stop writing and I never want to. It's how I let my soul out. But I need to read more.

I am a book lover by every definition of the word. I still read a good amount, but I want to return to the way I was when I was little. Since I could read on my own, I stayed up late in my bed with a neat little reading light poring through lines and lines of wondrous stories, opening up new worlds and giving new meaning to my own. Other kids got in trouble for staying up too late watching tv; I got in trouble for staying up too late reading.

In the mornings, my dad would lift me out of my top bunk bed before school (I've never been a morning person) and set me down in a fluffy emerald armchair in the living room with my blankie and the book I was currently reading (usually the one they had taken away the night before so I would get some sleep in).I would read as long as I could until it was time to go to school.

I never read those silly, fun-but-shallow, overridden-with-onomatopoeia books targeted at young kids with no interest in literature (I'm talking about you, Animorphs). My more popular choices included The Little House on the Prairie(I was in love with the whole series), Nancy Drew, Harry Potter, and Hans Christian Andersen books (I still have my first copy of The Little Mermaid; the original). Anything with fairies or princesses or magic was fair game. The American Girl books were an addiction. I loved Josefina, who was Mexican, like me, and Samantha, who lived in this beautiful Victorian house and had a parlor and ate petit fours and had tea time with her grandmother.

The point of this rant is that I don't read like that anymore, and I want to. I've gone through every J.R.R. Tolkien book; The Silmarillion was the last full novel (I hesitate to call it that) that I read. So here is my newest challenge, though it's really more like an indulgence:

I'm about to crack open this beautiful old book.

Yes, this is The Complete Works of Shakespeare. It belonged to my father, who acquired it in college from someone apparently named "Kayle Mack", or so it reads on the left inside cover.

I've read Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth through and through and seen plays and numerous adaptations of those and Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, and Much Ado About Nothing. But what I really want is to read his complete works and really try and understand Shakespeare. My first step is reading about Elizabethan England, to understand the world he lived in; then I'm going to choose a play and start reading.

Here begins the maturation of my relationship with Shakespeare. I'm going to try and read a play a month. Wish me luck!

And to close, a mouthwatering picture of a film version of the playwright, from Shakespeare In Love. He is possibly the only movie character I have ever become truly infatuated with, and to be fair I think I fell in love with Gwyneth Paltrow's character as well (one of my favorite movies).

Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe,
Than this of my neglect of reading.