yes, The Merchant of Venice is by Shakespeare. Hamlet! cool! I've never read it but I want to someday. You're right that Shakespearean English can be difficult, but the more plays you read, the easier it gets; and it helps to read an edition that has side notes explaining the words and passages that are harder to understand, so you don't have to spend very long deciphering them or looking them up. Once you can understand it, it's often beautiful - like a painting, except with words instead of paint. And I have no idea how Shakespeare can give such amazing insights into his characters, and humanity in general, in just a few scenes. It's as if the characters are real people, acting independently of Shakespeare himself... I don't know if I'll ever be able to write that well. :/

Still, Shakespeare's best for reading in school, or with other people, and analyzing afterward - otherwise you don't get so much out of it. As for other plays, I like the ones by Oscar Wilde. They were written in about 1890, I think? They're very witty and fun to read, and beneath all the hilarity there's often a very intriguing or gripping plot. Lady Windermere's Fan  and An Ideal Husband are quite good; so's The Importance of Being Earnest, although I don't like that one quite as much. The only one that's not so interesting (at least for me) is Salome. I'd definitely recommend the others, though.

Henrik Ibsen wrote some very good plays as well; the best is An Enemy of the People, I think. It's about a doctor who tries to do what is right (he wants to protect the health of his fellow townspeople) and meets with unexpected opposition, because what he's proposing would be very bad for the town economy. I won't give away the ending, but it's very interesting and amazingly relevant to the Covid pandemic.

No, I haven't read any Chekhov plays, but I want to try one someday. :)

I usually write very short novels (I have to work on making them longer...) and short stories, of several genres, although I like fantasy and realistic fiction best at the moment. I tend not to write so much poetry, although now and again I enjoy it. I've tried writing songs, but I'm not that great at it... :( I do like to sing poems to the tunes of songs I've already heard, but I suppose that really doesn't count. Have you ever written one? What do you tend to write? 

Yes, I feel kind of the same way about time passing. ooh, learning to drive! whee! I'm technically old enough to learn right now, but I'd rather wait till I'm older. Anyway, good luck with your driving! It should be nice not to have to wait for your parents to drive you everywhere :)

I'm looking forward to... well... um... now that I think of it, there doesn't seem to be anything important looming in the near future (that I know of, haha). One thing I want to do is enter a couple of stories in a local contest, so I'm looking forward to that, but I haven't even gotten around to choosing the stories yet! Aside from that, it looks like it'll be a rather nice year, so I'm just looking forward to the whole thing!

Oh and Jaybells, good luck with your midterms!!

Oof, I love all kinds of music - well, most kinds. Generally I like to listen to traditional/traditional-inspired music from all over the world, like Mexico, or Ireland, or the Middle East. Middle Eastern music often seems so beautiful to me - there's an Iranian song called Behet Ghol Midam, by Mohsen Yeganeh, which I've listened to several times already :) Other than that, I like country and folk music because it's usually so catchy and fun to listen to. I'll have to check out First Aid Kit - I'd never heard of them, but from what you say I think I'll probably enjoy their songs. And then for some reason I sometimes like music from movies, like part of the score from the LotR movies.

I don't usually listen to pop or rock, so for that reason I hardly ever recognize any of the singers mentioned on the CB!  I'd heard of AURORA, but only because she was a singer in Frozen II! (Speaking of which, what's your opinion on Frozen II?) I really ought to listen to her (and the others) and see if I like their songs. Time to broaden my musical experience!

As you can see, I really love listening to music :)

The painting on the notebook is Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies - quite a famous one, kind of a "typical" Monet painting, at least for me. Favorite artists? hmm... Winslow Homer, definitely - there's something really pretty about his style and the scenes he painted. I also like Ingres' style :) There are several other paintings like Sunrise on the Matterhorn, that I like, but I can't remember who painted them :( And I also really love Greek and Roman statues, although I can't call to mind one sculptor in particular. My family and I have gone to the Metropolitan on our very rare visits to New York City, and we always get stuck in the section that has Greek sculptures, despite our determined plans to visit the other sections. I'm always in awe of how those simple carvings of marble can look so incredibly like real people!

Yeah, Kandinsky did create really dynamic, pretty art! He made such good use of colors and patterns. I didn't know that he had synesthesia... One of his paintings is on the cover of a notebook I have. (Gosh, my family does seem to go in for paintings on notebooks!) Do you like to draw or paint?

Ooh, Russian history sounds so interesting! I did a short unit on the Russian Revolution, and the events leading up to it, but I had so much else planned for history this year that I couldn't spend as much time on it as I would have liked. (The Great Depression and WWII are the subjects I'm starting right now - not very cheerful ones, but oh well.) And Ancient Roman history is fascinating - at least I thought so when I studied it.

Don't worry, all of that makes perfect sense! :) Yeah, ski lodges are an awfully violent type of story, I've come to realize. The whole idea of a story where all the characters are supposed to die - for no reason at all - kind of invites violence, I guess.

About my opinion on violence in stories in general - thank you for asking! :) I think when you're writing stuff that's not meant to be published/shared, you can write it however you like. But if it is going to be read by other people, it shouldn't contain anything that could be upsetting or disturbing - especially if the readers are children/adolescents, because they're extra impressionable. My mom has shown me studies showing that children who are exposed to violent media are very likely to become violent themselves, since they start believing that's an acceptable way to get what they want, as well as becoming insensitive to suffering undergone by others. A lot of the time they also end up depressed or anxious - and all of this can happen even if they don't see any violence in real life. 

Anyway. Since all this has been proven to be true, my mom and I believe that it's really important to keep children from being exposed to that sort of thing. They need to be able to have a moral compass of some sort, which they can't get if they're repeatedly reading/watching things that don't emphasize the fact that violence/evilness should not go unpunished. Sometimes we don't realize the effect that a particular story can have, but it seems important to me to ensure that nothing on this site could encourage anyone to accept violence (even if it's just fictional violence) - especially since all the CBers are kids or teens.

Phew, I took a long time explaining that, didn't I? XD

Yep, Tolkien was kind of a pioneer in fantasy, I guess! When you think about it, before Tolkien and C. S. Lewis there really wasn't much fantasy, except for children's stories like the E. Nesbit books. (Have you ever read those?) I have a theory that Tolkien was inspired by the Norse myths, because sometimes his stories remind me of those.

There are a lot of things I enjoy in books! I love it when the style is really beautiful or vivid - that's one of the reasons I like Frances Hodgson Burnett's books. Humor is another thing I'm very fond of, like in P. G. Wodehouse's books, and clean, innocent romance. It's hard to find the kind of romance books I like - there's Jane Austen, but she's a little plodding in my opinion, and then there are lots of novels that aren't really romance at all, but Rather Shocking. Battles against evil, where the "good guys" win, is really nice too, which is why I like the Chronicles of Narnia so much. They often inspire a lot of my own books :) And it's kind of inspiring for when I'm going through hard times, like the pandemic.

I also really like it when the world described in the book is described so vividly that I feel like I'm living in it while I read. (If it's a world I'd like to live in, of course - one full of people I'd like to have for friends, fun adventures, beautiful places, and so on.)

If I'm in the mood for something more serious, I kind of like it when I read a book that can teach me something about life, and humanity - I mean, it doesn't have to be philosophical, but just well-written and deep enough that I gain something from reading it, whether it's a better understanding of a particular type of personality, or what tends to happen in a certain type of society, or whatever :) Of course I have to discuss/analyze the book in school to get the most out of it.

Whoa I went and answered that question really in-depth too! How about you, what do you enjoy in books?

As for drawing, I like to draw horses, although I do it less now than I used to, and flowers, birds, landscapes... a variety of things! I like to paint sunsets, because they're fairly easy and they're so pretty. I'd love to be able to draw people, but I can't do it very well. I'd need to practice more. Sometimes I trace pictures of faces, and they always come out looking quite different from the original, but sometimes they do look satisfactory. I love it when I can get personality into a face I've traced - it's quite inspiring for making up new characters based on them!

I've only painted on eggshells for Easter, it's a tradition in my family :)

Books do often lose something when you make them into movies. At least, I think they could be adapted satisfactorily, if you were very careful to keep the movie exactly like the book. But directors and screenwriters always seem to change the characters, and the dialogue, and the whole feeling of the book... I watched the movie version of Prince Caspian a couple of years ago, and the setting didn't look like Narnia at all. More like somewhere in California :)

You're going to read Momo? Have fun, I hope you enjoy it :) As for me, I'll look for Stargirl. Most of the titles you mentioned sound vaguely familiar; I think I've heard of some of them, but I've never actually read any. I know I've heard of The Giver. I haven't read it either, but I've read Number the Stars, which is by Lois Lowry too. I remember I liked it.

If I could meet a book character... well, this is like choosing a favorite book, I can't choose just one. I'd love to meet most of the characters in the Elizabeth Enright books, for instance. And I'd like to meet Robin, the main character in The Head of the House of Coombe, and Via from Wonder by R. J. Palacio. (Have you read Wonder?? I'd never heard of it but then I read it for school and loved it right away.) Oh, and maybe also Guido from Momo.

Oddly enough, even though I'd be thrilled to meet a book character, I'd be even more thrilled to meet one of my own characters. Same goes for being book characters; it would be really nice to get to take part in my own stories! But as for being a character from an actual book, I think I'd like to be Portia in Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright (sorry I keep mentioning her books, I just love them so much!!) or maybe Via from Wonder, even though she has to cope with a lot. Although, here's the thing; I wouldn't like to actually become any book characters, because I like being me; I'd just like to be in their situations, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I don't know much about fashion either - I haven't a pretty limited idea of what I should wear if I wanted to look fashionable. But, like you, I do have a fairly good idea of the kind of things I like to wear (slim jeans/corduroys, striking or pretty tops in bright colors, formal dresses although I never get to actually wear the latter, of course). What kinds of clothes do you prefer?

No worries! I'll still be around whenever you come back. Have a nice hiatus!!