Fun! Chapters alternate between Willie Shakespeare Greenburg, druggie graduate student in 1980's California, and the William Shakespeare, when he is 18, sleeping around (quite a bit), and is just starting to think about writing and acting. Clever juxtaposition between the two Williams and their lives. The Greenburg chapters were fun, if a bit frustrating when he keeps screwing things up (due to laziness and drugs, and sleeping around). The Shakespeare chapters are excellent historical fiction. While this is not the best book with Shakespeare in it ever, it certainly is worth reading. The cover of My Name is Will promises "Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare," and the novel delivers on all counts. This entertaining and impressive novel tells the parallel stories of Willie, a 1980s UC Santa Cruz student trying to sort out his master's thesis on Shakespeare while trying to deliver an enormous psychedelic mushroom to a mysterious buyer and an 18-year-old William Shakespeare finding his poetic voice while trying to hide his family's Catholic faith and shagging a couple of local maidens, one of them his future wife. Both storylines abound with wit and clever puns, and the Wm. Shakespeare sections offer tantalizing suggestions as to of some of the Bard's more famous passages. A bawdy comic novel sprinkled with literary heft and a lot of heart.
What do You think about My Name Is Will (2008)?
From time to time, this book is greater than the sum of its' parts. Worth reading once.
—Man
I desperately wanted this book to be so much better than it was.
—ikhwan
