Education is wasted on the young, and in my case a good example of that was the waste of a year-long course in Shakespeare my junior year of college. I went to a good school with a strong English department and the teacher was a good one. I found that I could read just the parts of the plays he'd have us write essays on and write about them well enough to do all right. A week before the final exam, though, he told us it would be a four-hundred question trivia test that did nothing but assess whether or not we'd read the plays. In which play did they sing a song with these lyrics; that sort of thing. I and a friend went to the library got books with synopses of the plays but we both did horribly in the final and got Ds for the course.
 All that sloth and guilt did not make me read [a:Maggie O'Farrell|91236|Maggie O'Farrell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1208204636p2/91236.jpg]'s [b:Hamnet|43890641|Hamnet|Maggie O'Farrell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1574943819l/43890641.SY75.jpg|68289933] with a negative bias, though, and even if it had the quality of O'Farrell's writing and story telling would have overcome it. The subtitle is A Novel of the Plague, making it, as an outtake from a review in The New Yorker said, "All too timely." The book gives you a real sense of what life was like in England in 1600 thanks to O'Farrell's stunning ability to evoke senses.

Mary mutters a string of words under her breath, a prayer, of sorts, an entreaty, then pulls Agnes to her. Her touch is almost rough, her fingers gripping Agnes's elbow, her forearm pressing down hard on Agnes's shoulder. Agnes's face is pressed to Mary's coif; she smells the soap in it, soap she herself made—with ashes and tallow and the narrow buds of lavender—she hears the rasp of hair against cloth, underneath. Before she shuts her eyes, submitting herself to the embrace, she sees Susanna and Hamnet step in through the back door.