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I think I'm starting to remember why I liked this book so much when I was thirteen. It does definitely capture a certain feeling of panic that you can't do anything about, even if it's a tough thing to sustain through the course of a whole novel.

Okay, seriously, this romantic sub-plot is ruining an otherwise decent book. It's just so obviously tacked on to stretch out the story and make the book more marketable. The other big problem is Sara, who is a very passive, boring protagonist.

Okay, seriously, this romantic sub-plot is ruining an otherwise decent book. It's just so obviously tacked on to stretch out the story and make the book more marketable. The other big problem is Sara, who is a very passive, boring protagonist.

I like how Hamilton tries to deny that Ancient Athens had class divisions and divisions of labor, when Athenian women were completely subjugated and a majority of the men were servants or slaves. This book is horrendous.

I like how Hamilton tries to deny that Ancient Athens had class divisions and divisions of labor, when Athenian women were completely subjugated and a majority of the men were servants or slaves. This book is horrendous.

I kind of wish there was a stronger divide between the topics of each chapter. I feel like you could rearrange the ideas in this book at random into completely different chapters and it wouldn't make much of a difference.

Ancient Greek society existed continuously for over a thousand years and encompassed millions of people - to try to assign a singular character to its writing, philosophy, and approach to knowledge is too absurd for words. Even if that wasn't the case, Hamilton's analysis of Greek literature is hilariously simplistic - the whole chapter just repeats the point that Greeks were efficient with words ad nauseam.

A couple months later, my opinion hasn't really changed - interesting information, not particularly well-written.

The problem with this book - which is growing on me, by the way - is that the side characters are so much more interesting than Sara. I'd honestly rather see this in third person, following several different characters, maybe before Matt died. Sara just doesn't have a very complex or interesting relationship to anyone except her dad, and I really don't care about the sub-plot with Alex.

It is way too late in the story for the threat to still be this vague. There's some tension, but not as much as Host wants there to be.

This is the kind of pseudo-anthropology that's more interested in passing judgement on the societies it talks about than it is in actually understanding them. The fact that Hamilton not once questions why these various cultures are they way they are, and takes it as a given that they exist continuously without evolution throughout their entire existence, is telling.

I do kind of like the way Host writes about sex in relation to power. It's the first thing in all these court dramatics that was at all interesting to me.

In retrospect, this isn't as impressive as I remember it. There's just a general lack of subtext in everything apart from the father's characterization - this generally feels like a very basic story about parental abuse. And it doesn't help that Sara reads three or four years younger than she should.

If not for the fact that Hamilton hates Rome just as much as she hates Egypt and China, this would be borderline white supremacy. Hamilton's generalizations of Ancient Greek culture are so blatantly sweeping and simplistic that I'm amazed anyone takes this book seriously. She seems to have little understanding of sociology at all, and she knows almost nothing about any ancient society other than Greece.

Almost to the end of the section I have to read for school. Thank god. This book isn't completely devoid of insight, but dear lord is it ever repetitive.

This is boring and repetitive and I'm not enjoying it in the slightest.

This is barely even an autobiography - it's mostly just Augstine's repetitive thoughts about his dedication to God. I know I can't hold a medieval author to the same standards as a modern one, but I really do feel like I'm gaining nothing from reading this.

This really doesn't make a good case for Christianity. The passage about astrology is comically un-self aware - the way that doctor debunks astrology could apply verbatim to debunking Christianity.

The frustrating thing is, every once in a while, there will be some semi-interesting insight on why we do bad things or the loneliness of coming into oneself. But it's undercut by the repetitive, uninteresting discussions of religion - this book can't really surprise me, because I know that loving God more is the solution to everything.

Colonial history is always quite depressing. Especially with the knowledge that this isn't really going to get any better. We haven't even really gotten into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict yet.

Maybe this is just me searching for essay material, but I think the way the women in this play are written is really fascinating. It's sort of similar to Hamlet, where they're largely powerless but they try to affect things however they can. But I like this better, because we actually get to see their thoughts and discussions a lot more, rather than just seeing how the male characters react to them.

Today was a landmark event in my time on GoodReads: I got my very first completely unsolicited troll. Go me!

This is an interesting play, but it just hasn't aged well, because contemporary people are almost never familiar with this intricate history that Shakespeare assumed his audience knew. That makes the play very hard to follow.

This play is a lot more interesting when Richard is on stage.

This self-flagelation is getting old very, very quickly. I just don't have patience for the ramblings of self-hating religious people.

Well, this sucks. Standard covertly racist lionization of Ancient Greece as the greatest and most rational society in the world, whose accomplishments no 'eastern' society could hope to match. As if Greece didn't have slaves, or pseudo-democratic despots, or control of the dissemination of ideas. This makes me sick.

The scenes where Richard isn't on stage are a lot less interesting than the ones where he is.

This is very boring. Like, maybe a religious person would find this interesting, but I just don't have much use for it. I guess it's interesting to see attitudes towards religion from such a different time and place, but... well, honestly, it's not that different from what you'd see from a highly religious person (like a priest or a monk or something) today.

I hate how, when the authors want to talk about women, they're basically reduced to talking about general trends and mentioning how women were important in these trends, even in a book that's devoted to specific stories. I don't know if there really is that little written about women (even elite ones), or if it's the difficulties of translating texts from Arabic, Farsi, ect., but its disappointing either way.

Well, this is certainly not one of Shakespeare's more subtle plays. But I'm kind of enjoying it, in a soap opera-ish way.