★★★★
Temeraire: Book I
You know, it’s amazing how many different ways you can say, ‘Hornblower with dragons’. You can say it rather dismissively, as I did before actually reading the book, or you can say it with great excitement and added exclamation marks, as I did on finishing it. This was one of those cases where I’d made assumptions about a book beforehand – only to enjoy it much, much more than I’d expected to.
In the wake of Henry V, I ventured back to the two instalments of The Hollow Crown which I should have watched before: Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. These were entirely new to me: I had never seen them before, either on the stage or on screen, and never read them either. I’ve always felt a little daunted by the history plays in general, and I steered particularly clear of anything with multiple parts (Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 remain to be tackled on a future occasion). As the two plays form two halves of the same story and have the same cast, I wanted to deal with them together – and yet to consider each separately.
★★★½
As I started this book, I had troubling flashbacks to my GCSE studies of Hard Times. The village of Fetherhoughton, where the action of Fludd takes place, has grown up around the cotton mill industry and a grimmer, bleaker, more relentlessly depressing place would be hard to find. Founded in the smoke and soot of the Industrial Revolution, the village has managed to avoid all the benefits of modernity and, in the 1950s, maintains a kind of moorland isolation.
★★½
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for the random swashbuckler of the week! I had never heard of this book, which was recommended automatically to me by LibraryThing, but since the Kindle version was free, I couldn’t resist. It turns out that Captain Fracasse was Gautier’s third full-length novel, published in 1863, nine years before his death. It’s a romantic romp through a picturesque vision of 17th-century France, following a troupe of commedia dell’ arte actors travelling from Gascony to Paris, with a poverty-stricken young nobleman in their midst.
★★★★
Last night I finally settled down to watch the BBC’s adaptation of Henry V, screened last year, as part of The Hollow Crown series. I should have watched the two parts of Henry IV first, it’s true; but I was discussing Tom Hiddleston with Heloise yesterday (re. his being a fan-favourite to play Lymond, if that ever comes to the screen) and was curious to see how he’d fare in this lead role.
★★★
The Hungarian Antal Szerb is probably best known to most of us for Journey by Moonlight (which I began earlier in the year and need to come back to), but The Pendragon Legend is his first novel, written after he’d spent a year studying in England in 1929-30. It’s an adventurous parody of the kind of Gothic thrillers popular at the time; but, for me, it never quite managed to transcend its sources and become a satisfying story in its own right. I felt it had the enthusiastic and uneven feel of a writer trying to find his feet.
★★★★
The Gentleman Bastards: Book I
I must begin by saying that the rather fabulous cover you see here is not the cover of the edition I’ve borrowed from the library, which is instead one of the standardised bright yellow books in the Gollancz 50 series. Although the title had caught my attention on previous visits – alluringly alliterative, it tumbles off the tongue very nicely – the blank yellow cover had never quite drawn me in. This time, however, I caved in. And thank God I did. Needless to say, if the library copy had had the cover you see here, I’d have got round to reading this several months ago. I’m just not the kind of girl who can resist shadowy figures with tricorn hats and swords, against semi-fantastical Venetian backdrops.
Today is this blog’s second birthday and so I just wanted to take a few lines to say thank you to all the lovely people who read The Idle Woman, leave comments and send me emails. You have no idea how much it brightens up my day to hear from you, so please keep it up!
★★★★
I’ve wanted to get my hands on this ever since reading Music and Silence several years ago and it has definitely been worth the wait. Tremain has just published a sequel to Restoration, titled Merivel: A Man of His Time, so I thought I’d better catch up before everyone starts telling me how wonderful it is. I don’t know her work that well – Music and Silence and Restoration are her only novels that I’ve read to date – but in both cases I’ve been struck by her shrewdness, her poise and her sheer skill as a writer.
★★★
This sequel to Stella Duffy’s Theodora picks up the story two years after the conclusion of the earlier book, when Justinian and his wife are established as Emperor and Empress. It covers the next twenty years of their reign and shows how, as the most powerful woman in the Western world, Theodora must shift her priorities. Nothing less than the safety of the Roman world is at stake, and there are dangers everywhere: in religious dissention; in the war with Persia; and in the presence of those who believe the purple would become them – whether that’s the ambitious John the Cappadocian, or the unfortunate Hypatius, whose claim is picked up by the mob.
The Idle Woman 