The Geekiest Geek to Ever Geek Down the Pike, and Other Tales

I am currently trying to work my way through basically every text J.R.R. Tolkien has ever written.  Or at least the published ones.  Not just The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit .  Not even just The Silmarillion and Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.  ALL of them. Also, books written ABOUT Tolkien and Middle Earth.  I've read critical theory reviews of his works, books about the deeper allegorical meanings (despite the fact that he famously hated allegory) and source works on which he based Middle Earth.  I think, at this point, I've read four different translations of Beowulf.  And it's not always an easy task.  Christopher Tolkien, bless his heart, has patiently, methodically, painstakingly combed through all these random typewritten, handwritten, loose-leaf, bound manuscripts to try to trace the evolution of what Tolkien called his legendarium.  And I've been trying to slog through all of it.  The "finished" works (the ultima...

Jo Nesbo's Macbeth is the third of the Hogarth Shakespeare books I've read (the other two were Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood, based on The Tempest, and Vinegar Girl , by Anne Tyler, based on The Taming of the Shrew. NONE of them have been good. Maybe it's because, let's be honest, not all of Shakespeare's plots stand up three hundred years later. What makes Shakespeare's plays great is the writing. The dialogue, the soliloquys, and most especially the insults are still classic. But almost all the comedies are the same story line, set in a different Italian city, with different names. So when you strip away the details, the plots aren't always great. Or, maybe, it's because it's hard to do a good re-write, as many of the recent reboots of '90s and '00s TV shows and movies have proved. Nesbo's Macbeth is a SWAT team leader set in drug- and crime-riddled 1970s Scotland, and MacDuff (here just Duff) is the head of the narcotics unit, desper...