To Be Or Not to Be

      To be or not to be…This is a line from the famous story “Hamlet” by the one and only Shakespeare. For most people this brings joy and most of all, their inner nerd comes out, but for me I couldn’t be more miserable. I think about that famous line and its literal meaning in which is to live or not to live and when Shakespeare comes to mind, I would choose not to live. I understand that Shakespeare was one of the greatest writers to ever walk this earth, and his writing is filled with scholarly motives and themes, but to me it couldn’t be more difficult or boring to read. We are in the 21^st century, I am not worried about men who wore skirts, and rode horses and had obnoxiously long hair, or about women who constantly wore dresses and crowns and married there uncles or brother in laws, like students would be during this point in time.

        This also brings about the aspect of poetry. Every one of Shakespeare's writings is in poetic form, and it just makes the story drag on. First you have to worry about the iambic pentameter and syllables and then come grammar, spelling, and best of all, big words that only higher level thinkers would be able to define. Yes, I am in AP English and I should be enlightened by this “brilliance” of writing, but I don’t find it anymore relevant than the fly buzzing around the room.

         What I like to read is the more modern books like the one we started recently called “The Stranger”. It is about a boy who has lost his mother and is kind of alone in the world. He has a very passive and somber tone about him, in which is also like many characters in Shakespeare work, including Hamlet himself, but the recent story of the boy Meursault is far more interesting and worthwhile. It is told in plain, modern English in a style that everyone could relate to. The author of the book Albert Camus establishes the novel with a narrator, who was made like a realistic every day person that says what is on his mind, and it is things that me and everyone else reading can understand and have comparable feelings with. No this book isn’t as “nerdy” as Shakespearean work but it is still has great scholarly merit and shouldn’t be taken for granted when it comes to reading in a higher level English class..” Other books like this including To Kill a Mockingbird and Angela’s Ashes (When reading these types of books I am more likely to think “to be” instead of “not to be), should be looked at more closely rather than historical poems of stories about times that haven’t been apart of society in hundreds of years.