Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel
What you must never forget about this one is that you’re still in Wolf Hall. That’s trite, I know! But I can’t think of what else to say because as I reoriented my perspective on reading this, its power really hit me. I read Wolf Hall five years ago, at a different period in my life and thought it was just ok. Appreciated what it was doing but I didn’t have the focus to engage with it like I should have. Time and age tend to confer […]
Dissolution by CJ Sansom
Read as part of CBR16 Bingo: Horses. This book features people riding horses as a practical matter because it’s set in the 15th century. First of all: RIP CJ Sansom. I didn’t know until I started this that he had recently died, and sadly just before Shardlake, a tv series based on these books, was released on Hulu. I read Sansom’s Dominion years ago and thought it was decent. I grabbed this not long after but eventually gave up on keeping it, as I just needed to clear […]
Hockney: A Graphic Life (BioGraphics) by Simon Elliott
I could tell you every little piece of the puzzle that makes up Hockney: A Graphic Life (BioGraphics) by Simon Elliott, but then you would not have a reason to read it, and I think you really should. If you are not the usual reader for graphic novels; do not know much about David Hockney; or even if you are not a huge fan of biographies, don’t worry about it. This format might be a great way to start it for adults. This book is […]
Never Wager with a Wallflower by Virginia Heath
Venus and Galahad have never really gotten along, but when he buys the buildings next to the orphanage she works at intending to turn them into a gambling hall, their sparring begins to look a lot more like attraction and respect. This is the third book in the Merriwell Sisters, which follows a trio of sisters who must make their own way in the world after being abandoned by their ne’er-do-well father. I haven’t read the first two books, but this worked well as a […]
Great Scandals of the Victorians by Debbie Blake
Public Faces, Secret Lives by Wendy L. Rouse
Great Scandals of the Victorians: Disreputable Stories from the Royal Court to the Stage – 3.5 stars For all that Victorians had a reputation for being straitlaced, they had their fair share of scandals – and some of them ended up having major effects on contemporary society, sometimes even driving forth social changes which still affect us today. I love a good gossip session about people I’ve never met, which is why history is one of my favorite subjects. In this book, we learn about […]
A Woman of Influence: The Spectacular Rise of Alice Spencer in Tudor England by Vanessa Wilkie
Alice Spencer, the youngest daughter of a wealthy farmer, was just another building block in the Spencer dynasty, but the marriage that made her the Countess of Derby was just the start of her spectacular rise through the ranks of Tudor England. This book answered a very important question that’s been bothering me for a very long time: Why did medieval aristocrats splash around so much money on frivolous luxuries? I knew the answer had something to do with amassing power and influence, but it’s […]
