I loved reading this book. It's witty and it is about a subject that really interests me these days: Whether Richard III was the murderer he was made out to be by the Tudors and Shakespeare. Specifically whether Richard murdered the princes in the Tower.
The more I read about this subject the more I dislike the Tudors. Even if Richard was getting rid of rivals to his throne - which at the very least is doubtful IMO, the Tudors did do this very thing! Only when they did it it was considered rightful and a-okay. It makes me grrrrrrr.
has a new Vampire novel out with the characters from THOSE WHO HUNT THE NIGHT and TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD (both of which I greatly enjoyed back in the day) and it's set in 1912 China.
Has anybody read it yet?
Only available in Hardcover and rather pricey, hmmm.
Interesting book about a woman, Katherine de Roet, who was a great beauty and became very important to European history. Her sister was married to Geoffrey Chaucer. Katherine herself was poor and convent raised and had to marry a guy who she did not love. Through that marriage she caught the eye of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and became friends with his wife. After the wife's and Katherine's husband's death she became the mistress of the Duke of Lancaster and had four children with him, while at the same time Lancaster married somebody else for reasons of power. Later in their lives John of Gaunt threw everybody in a tizzy when he married his mistress Katherine and had their children legitimized. Katherine and John and their formerly illegitimate offspring became the ancestors of the - wait for it - both the Tudor and the Stuart dynasties.
whether I read the same books some of the reviewers on amazon.com do. I understand everybody brings their different life experiences to their reading but sometimes it's hard to believe the reviewer has actually read the same book.
is Anne Stuart - specifically I am talking about her contemporary novels of "dark romantic suspense". I found in my travels in romance novel land that quite frankly the average romance novel is crap and you have to get recs and dig around some to get the good stuff. In that particular sub genre Anne Stuart writes the good stuff. I saw a co-worker reading her and I asked whether she was a favorite and she said she buys all of Stuart's contemporaries, sight unseen. So I just had to sample her back catalogue. And boy! That woman knows how to write a page turner, once you start a book you can't stop until you finish. Stuart specializes in a particular kind of "hero", the dark, tortured kind of dubious morality and motives, "bad boys". And her bad boys are bad, not just token bad. Or "misunderstood" with a secret heart of gold or something like that. They are so bad that in other novels of that kind they would be the villain. I am not kidding. I always wonder how Stuart will pull off her protagonists becoming believable material for the heroine's HEA by the end - but she always pulls it off! And while her leading men are all the same type, they are all different characters from each other so things don't get repetitive from book to book. And Stewart manages to make these guys attractive and rootable even though they do horrible things, things that would be, should be a complete turn-off to me. There is this one book where I thought no, you won't get me this time, lady...the leading man is the type of person I absolutely loathe in real life - the charismatic con man who runs a religious cult who bilks millions from gullible rich people who have fallen for his spiel and under his spell. Ritual Sins, and Luke Bardell is the "hero". But Stewart seduced me again and I was rooting for this bastard!
Anne Stuart knows how to do story and character alchemy.
A couple of years ago I tried to read the first in the Twilight series and gave up in disgust. Now I have read Holly Black's "Tithe", "Valiant" and "Ironside", and "Wicked Lovely" by Melissa Marr and I have enjoyed those. On the surface the Twilight saga and the other mentioned titles have a lot in common - they are all supernatural romances aimed at the YA market in particular - though in general they are all very popular with women period. Twilight has the vampires and the others have the Faerie.
But the devil as they say is in the details and I just can not stand the Twilight author's religious beliefs and how that bleeds into those books. I fully admit I just lack tolerance for it. And that's that.
The Holly Black books are great fun. I enjoy her writing style and how she describes the world she builds. I love the way she makes ordinary things seem extraordinary and common things singular. How the ugly can be beautiful, and the beautiful very ugly. A lot of the characters in the Tithe series are decidedly downmarket, indeed in a lot of romantic fiction these characters would be swept aside because they are not glamorous enough, or glamorous at all. They are what is commonly referred to as "trailer trash". I really fell in like with Kaye and Corny and Luis.
I have only read the first Wicked Lovely book - also a Faerie subject but totally different vibe than Holly Black's, I like it too and I am going on to the second book in the series, "Ink Exchange".
In both Black's and Marr's verse the Faerie are very un-Disney like - they are very cruel to each other and very cruel to humans.
Over the holidays I read "The Thief" by Megan Whalen Turner and then "The Queen Of Attolia", and now I am reading "The King Of Attolia". I am really glad that I knew nothing about these books before reading because I get to enjoy the at times surprising emotional journey the main characters go on. The first book is okay for older children, the other two are more adult. Highly recommended if you haven't read them.
Watching the second season of "Breaking Bad" now, am up to the fourth episode. It scares me a little how attached I have become to Jesse especially.
contemplative
curious
sleepy
blah
impressed