Book Talk

[Carol]

"potioncat" wrote:
>
> It's vacation time. Time at the pool, at the beach, general laid back and take it easy time.
> 
> So, I'd like to know. What are you reading right now.

Carol responds:
Erm, um, I am embarrassed to say, "Goblet of Fire." I'm going through the series again as I wait to attend the HBP movie a little later in the month.

Potioncat:
> How did you choose it Would you recommend it? Will you finish it? 
<snip>

Carol:
My name is Carol, and I'm a Harry Potter addict.

I think you know the answers to the other two questions!

Seriously, I have a problem that I can't solve. I've tried other books, but either (like the HP books and LOTR and Jane Austen) they're so familiar that I know them by heart or I can't get into them. I reread all my Richard III books (the ones that don't make me want to burn them) and all my evolution books (anyone want to discuss Australopithecines or Homo Habilils?) and I'm struggling--it has taken me literally two months--to finish "A History of Europe" by J.M. Roberts, which is so full of wordy, awkward sentences (and occasional typos) that I just want to copyedit it rather than absorbing the content. I do intend to read "The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples" afterward. with luck, it will get better.

Fiction? Well, okay, I've reread some academic mysteries like "Book: A Novel" and "Murder at the MLA," but I think you have to have been a member of an English department at an American university to appreciate them. I also enjoy two Richard III-related mysteries, which I do recommend to anyone who's read Shakespeare's wildly unhistorical play on Richard, the old classic "Daughter of Time" by Josephine Tey in which a detective confined to his hospital bed "solves" the mystery of the so-called princes in the tower and "The Murders of Richard III" by elizabeth Peters, which involves eccentric British Ricardians (Richard fans), one of whom seems to secretly believe the Shakespearean version of events. Both of them are charmingly written and amusing. "Daughter of Time" is very British and old-fashioned (set, IIRC, in the late 1940s or early 1950s). I recommend them as light reading and as introductions to a Richard other than the monster presented by Shakespeare.

Potioncat: 
> Mistress of the Monachy by Alison Weir. That would be a great title for a bodice ripper, wouldn't it? But this is a biography of Katherine Swynford. She was the mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt---several of their descendants were involved in the War of the Roses (on both sides) Six US presidents are descended from her. (according to the book.) I'm enjoying it very much, and it ties in with The Great Warming.

Carol:
Biography? Have you read her "biography" of Richard's wife, Anne Neville? Alison Weir is the Rita Skeeter of fifteenth-century history. She may be okay with Katherine Swynford since she was before Richard's time, but I'm sure you can't help noting a marked pro-Lancastrain bias, even there. BTW, "several of their descendants were involved in the War[s] of the Roses" is a bit of an understatement since Richard Duke of York and all his sons, including Edward IV and Richard III, were descended from him on the Yorkist side, and Henry VI and his son Edward of Lancaster were descended from him on the Yorkist side. Even Henry Tudor, ostensibly a Lancastrian though he was only descended from Henry VI's French mother, was a Beaufort (a legitimized descendant of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford) on his mother's side. (The Yorkists, of course, were also descended from two other sons of Edward III, Lionel Duke of Clarence and Edmund duke of York.)

Carol, with apologies for the lack of objectivity