Justin Monisit’s Reviews > Shakespeare's Sonnets > Status Update

Okay to be really honest I am not in the mood to read these anymore. Will probably be putting this on a DNF shelf on account of my disinterest.

Maybe I'll read the highlight reel of this - but there are so many "meh" sonnets that I can't really muster up enough interest to read them all.

71/154

Same old stuff, some great sonnets to hang on my wall and some others that I'll better be off forgetting. Would really wish Shakespeare would write more stuff that's not primarily about a woman's beauty, the poems besides that are usually the highlights here.

63/154 - Shakespeare has a weird fixation on being completely subservient to a woman he loves. Not the best message to be sending.

Again, varies wildly in quality, but there are some excellent sonnets in here among the not-so-great ones. Especially the ones where he is not talking about a woman - time and mortality especially - are great.

Reading through a single sonnet takes a lot longer than I anticipated.

Sonnet 49/154.

Oh boy do we cherry pick the best sonnets from this collection; there are some excellent sonnets here, but there are plenty of bad and forgettable ones that outnumber them.

I didn't expect all of them to be great but not so many of them to be just...boring. I thought there would be a trend of the early ones being bad but there is straight up no consistency.

It's the White Album of poetry.

Read up to Sonnet 20 out of 154. Kind of slow when he talks about why women should be mothers, but once Sonnets 15-20 come around it becomes amazing - like I read the sonnets twice because I was so impressed with the ways a woman's beauty can be described.

Reading this for fun since I haven't had much exposure to poetry aside from Plath (Ariel) and Poe. So far The Bard is becoming my favorite thus far.