“I see you. I see all those who men call monsters.

“And I see the men who call them that. Call themselves heroes, of course.

“I only see them for an instant. Then they're gone.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

Somewhat to my surprise, I did not love this. The writing is lively & engaging and there's certainly plenty to say about the Dudleys; but I was frustrated by the handling of Amy Robsart's death. (I do not think Dudley killed her.)

I was interested in a novel about celebrity and fandom in the twenty-first century, and that's what this is -- but I wanted something more grounded and less abstract. Didn't love the way this story was told.

I have read a shocking number of Elizabeth I bios in my time, and this one is my favorite. Comprehensive but still an absolute pleasure to read.

I _really_ struggled with the dialect but this book hooked me in the second half and I ended up falling in love with it. Janie is a wonderful protagonist. Pro-tip: Read it in big chunks if you can.

Maaaaybe a little bit pat in the end but I just could not get over how beautifully written it was. The kind of book that makes you want to just luxuriate in its sentences. For a 184-page book, that's enough.

I really loved this portrait of a town in the 1930s. It's a political/social novel so not all the characters are as developed as I would have liked them to be, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

“That morning‘s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

Comprehensive but oddly-paced -- Spawforth is apparently a lateral thinker and there's not really a clear chronology even though it's billed as a biography. Lots of great anecdotes, though.

Don Carlos, Philip II's son, contemplated as a match for Mary Queen of Scots, sounds like a real winner: “He had always been an unpromising youth, but in 1562 his 'natural imbecility' had been aggravated by brain damage incurred when he had fallen downstairs while chasing a maidservant.“

Every biography of Elizabeth I devotes pages and pages to the question of why she never married but honestly I feel like “My father had my mother and one of my stepmothers beheaded“ serves as an adequate reason. That is not a great introduction to the institution of matrimony!

“The koels began to call before daylight. Their voices rang out from the dark trees like an arrangement of bells, calling and echoing each others‘ calls, mocking and enticing each other into ever higher and shriller calls.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

I actually loved this book -- very engagingly written and Cecil himself is as vivid as any fictional protagonist. Highly recommended if you're interested in how Elizabeth's court functioned.

You can definitely see Elif Batuman's influence (she blurbs it and is thanked in the acknowledgements) but I actually enjoyed this more than I usually enjoy Batuman's work. Interesting portrait of a frustrating protagonist.

“On Friday Penguin Random House confirmed that an unpublished Gabriel García Márquez novel – titled En Agosto Nos Vemos, (We‘ll See Each Other in August) – not only exists, but will be on shelves across Latin America in 2024.“

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/28/gabriel-garcia-marquez-unseen-nove...

“How could we deprive them of the daughters they raised to become their allies, their cellmates in the prison called life, because we want to not only have but also to show off having the freedom and happiness that they never did?“

#SundaySentence

“She might have been waiting for her lover. For three quarters of an hour she had sat on the same high stool, half turned from the counter, watching the swing door.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

You think you've picked up an accessible narrative history, and then Jurgen Habermas shows up in the first paragraph.

Still working my way through this book, I have reached 1970 and learned that Candice Bergen's mother got very huffy about what she wore to the Oscars. I disagree, to my mind this is the Platonic ideal of 1970s Oscars regalia. 10/10, no notes. My only regret is that I cannot find a less blurry image.

Thirty pages in this is wildly entertaining. So far I have learned that Douglas Fairbanks turned pale and wept when his wife Mary Pickford had the audacity to cut her hair (men are so _emotional_, amirite?) and that on the set of one early talkie, the microphone was hidden in the false hump of a man playing a hunchback, which he swung back and forth between the other actors when they were speaking.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,“ Jane Austen famously wrote in _Pride and Prejudice_. Two hundred years later, Margaret Atwood offered a riposte from the other side: “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

This is grim:

“Magellan‘s crew, confined aboard their ships, relied on worm-eaten biscuits and flying fish that landed on the decks. They slowly succumbed to scurvy, which Magellan and other officers escaped by accident. Because of their rank, they were entitled to an allocation of jam made from quince, a tart little fruit rich in vitamin C. Without realizing how or why, those who had access to quince were protected.“

“To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished.“

#SundaySentence

“Even by royal standards, the family into which the future Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638 was a nest of vipers.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

An absorbing, brutal novel about Nigeria. Hard to read at times but worth the effort. The characters felt real and I grew quite attached to some of them; Wuraola especially has my heart.

Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion, but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, ‘Collecting material‘. No one can object to that.

#SundaySentence

I enjoyed this social satire quite a bit -- it's well-written and witty, if dated in its treatment of women and occasionally offensive language.

“The headmaster‘s wife twisted herself round in her chair to talk to Mrs Morland, who was sitting in the row just behind her. ‘I can‘t make out,‘ she said reflectively, ‘why all the big boys seem to be at the bottom of preparatory schools and the small ones at the top.'“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

Went in completely blind. I don't know what I expected but this wasn't it -- still, I loved it to bits and plan to read it again in, oh, I don't know, thirty years or so.

“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

When her husband Henry II died during a joust, Catherine de Medici replaced her previous personal device (a rainbow) with a broken lance and a Latin inscription that means “From this come my tears and my pain,“ and I respect her grief but that just feels a little extra.

New Jhumpa Lahiri collection coming in October! (I admit I didn't love Whereabouts but I'm hoping this is a return to form.)

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

#SundaySentence

Today I learned that the king of France may have cradled da Vinci in his arms as the elderly artist died. After da Vinci delivered a short lecture on the probable causes of his own death.

“Henry Lyulph Holland, first Earl of Slane, had existed for so long that the public had begun to regard him as immortal. The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognise extreme old age as a sign of excellence.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

The Last Supper, both in its creation and in its current state, becomes not just an example of Leonardo‘s genius but also a metaphor for it. It was innovative in its art and too innovative in its methods. The conception was brilliant but the execution flawed. The emotional narrative is profound but slightly mysterious, and the current state of the painting adds another thin veil of mystery to the ones that so often shroud Leonardo‘s life and work.

New Naomi Alderman incoming in November: https://lithub.com/exclusive-see-the-cover-for-naomi-aldermans-the-future

I loved The Power so I'm really excited about this one.

Da Vinci's to-do list:

* Describe the tongue of the woodpecker
* Go every Saturday to the hot bath where you will see naked men
* Inflate the lungs of a pig and observe whether they increase in width and in length, or only in width

“I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were.“

#SundaySentence

A few weeks ago I realized both that I missed cooking and that the picky eaters were (mostly) out of the house, so I've been spending weekends trying new recipes. I made shakshuka for the first time and it turned out so pretty. (OK, this isn't _super_ book related but I do recommend this cookbook very highly, we've loved almost everything I've made out of it.)

“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

May we all face the challenges of our day with the composure of John Stubbs, who was condemned by Elizabeth I to lose his right hand for a seditious pamphlet. On the scaffold he made a dad joke (“Now my calamity is at hand“), then removed his hat and shouted “God Save Queen Elizabeth!“ before fainting at the sight of the stump where his hand used to be.

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there: “In 1593, upset over the French King Henry IV‘s conversion to Catholicism, Elizabeth spent twenty-six hours translating Boethius‘s Consolations of Philosophy into English, to calm her anger.“

I just read the last 300-odd pages of this in one sitting and now I have a slight book hangover.

“We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind.”

-- Kenzaburo Oe, 1935 - 2023

“What‘s as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarred by her own. Girl as sacrifice to the idea of girl. Girl as a series of childhood photographs, all marked with the aura of girl who will die young, as if even the third grade portrait photographer should have seen it written on her face, that this was a girl who would only ever be a girl.“

#SundaySentence

Lovely interview with Margaret Atwood: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/11/margaret-atwood-it-would-be-fun-to...

“I can see Wife of Bath syndrome going on all around me in women my age who are thinking: 'I‘m not done yet, I‘ve had all this life experience and here‘s what I have to tell you.'“

(I haven't read Old Babes in the Wood yet but I'm on the library list.)

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

I was finishing Twilight Sleep today when I heard that Kellyanne and George Conway were divorcing and I could not help but think about what Edith Wharton might have done with that marriage. What a novel that would have been!

“Mr. Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr. Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, sat alone in Mr. Sniggs‘ room overlooking the garden quad at Scone College. From the rooms of Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, two staircases away, came a confused roaring and breaking of glass.“

#FirstLineFriday #FridayReads