08 October, 2014

Hilarious Macbeth

This was our journey on Saturday. As you can
see we didn't even leave our state!
We travelled about 800km on Saturday. Earlier in the holidays we travelled about 400km on two separate days. Most of these journeys were, mercifully, on outback Australian roads. One lane of traffic each way, but other traffic was minimal. It was great to be out of the city and out of city traffic. 

It was great to even be out of expressway traffic. Mostly, in Japan, when you travel distances like that you travel on expressways. If you don't, you travel at about 60km/hr. It just isn't as enjoyable as driving in Australia.

But still, the boys got bored with the long drive. Thankfully I figured out that we can borrow eBooks from the local library. I downloaded them onto my phone and hey presto. We had hours of listening fun.
I didn't aim too high in the reading levels, because we still have a 9 y.o. That wasn't necessarily popular with our rampant reading teenager, but he read his own book. My favourite book for the trip was a clever rewrite of Macbeth for a younger audience. I studied this in high school and haven't read it since, so my understanding of the story was a bit sketchy. 

Check it out: Just Macbeth by Andy Griffiths. It is very funny in many places, it had me laughing so hard I was crying while trying to drive 110km/hr. But I'm not sure if that funniness is just an Australian thing or if a different audience would find it just odd. 

We enjoyed it so much that I checked out the paper copy yesterday from the library for people to re-read. However I suspect that the audio version is better than the paper version. The narrator's part was hilarious. I'm hearing bits of the story quoted around the house. I suspect they might be around for a while yet.

Actually, I just checked and though I got the book off the shelf at the library and put it in the bag, it hasn't come home. Someone must have put it back. Oh well, I'll have to get it next time.

4 comments:

  1. I think I remeber this from around about the 60's somewhere. Andy Griffiths started out as a stand up comedian who told stories in a southern US dialect. These were on vinyl records and played on local radio stations. I remeber one where the punchline was, "What it was, was a football." Of course Andy went on to be a tv star as the sherriff of Mayberry. Don't know if you've ever caught any of those reruns.

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  2. You know, when I saw "Griffiths" a little bell started ringing in the back of my brain. After some Google research I now know that with an 's' is an Australian author (some books leaking into the US apparently) Without the 's' is the American actor/comedian/tv father of little Opie Cunningham nee Taylor.

    Mark this - a full admission that I was WRONG! Gomen neh

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  3. My first reaction was, she must be wrong, because he's not that old (only born 61). But of course in your second comment you are quite right again!

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