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Apr. 20th, 2022 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnBeing just months behind on life in general (recent visit with parents involved them scolding me for not doing one thing I should have been doing, and then when I did that (the deal being that parents would look after kids in the meantime) they were like, why didn't you do this other thing??) I have not said anything about the couple of historical-ish books I read over... uh, Christmas.
1. The King's Touch (Jude Morgan): historical fiction told from the point of view of Charles II's illegitimate son, James, Duke of Monmouth. (He's often called "Jemmy" in the book to distinguish himself from Charles' brother James (later James II), and so I will call him here.) I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about the Stuarts in this time period. It's both extremely readable and seems quite well researched (by which I mean thatselenak has very few nitpicks about it). Morgan makes the people of this era come alive, so that they're real people to me, entangled in a web of relationships, rather than (as they'd been previously) a list of characters and titles tenuously related by anecdotes told to me in salon -- Minette (Charles's sister) and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, and their disastrous marriage, and Minette and Charles's relationship; James (II) and the ways in which he was awful and was clearly on a path to disaster once he became king; William of Orange and Mary (James (II)'s daughter) and their arranged-to-love marriage and how they related to Charles and James and Jemmy; Jemmy himself, obviously, and the way he related to all of these people, and overall to Charles II himself, and a lot more as well. This can be read with no knowledge of the era or the people; I'd had the salon synopsis (see the first few comments), but could be read without that.
I feel that Morgan tries to make the presentation as balanced as possible given that Jemmy is the narrator (probably to the extent of making Jemmy more understanding than he might have been in real life), but Jemmy does have strong feelings about things. (For example, I came away with very strong negative feelings about Philippe, who doesn't seem to have been a super nice person anyway but who was at least incrementally nicer to his second wife, which one wouldn't have known from reading this book, since Jemmy wasn't related to the second wife.)
2. Game of Queens (Gristwood) - Nonfiction book about the 16th century, focusing on the queens: beginning with Isabella the Catholic and going down to Queen Elizabeth of England. It was highly recommended byselenak here. Now, I will say that I think I don't know enough (basically zero) about this era for this kind of survey book to be ideally suited to my learning about it -- all the early queens in the book (Anne de Beaujeu, Louise of Savoy -- Margaret of Austria being something of an exception because she's so very cool) are honestly kind of blending together for me aside from a few disjointed facts, a couple of months after reading it. However, I'm still glad I read it, because the next time I encounter these women I'll have more context for them (and it's already happened a couple of times in salon that they've been referenced and I was like "oh right!"). Once the book got to Mary Tudor, Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth, I was on much more familiar ground (even when I didn't know details, I at least had a fair bit more knowledge about the contextual history of Henry VIII and so on), and so I found those parts much easier going.
Anyway, I still recommend this! Just, it's easier to read if one is even vaguely familiar with the period, and I found the Morgan novel a better way to quickly ingest a large quantity of information about a period I knew very little about.
1. The King's Touch (Jude Morgan): historical fiction told from the point of view of Charles II's illegitimate son, James, Duke of Monmouth. (He's often called "Jemmy" in the book to distinguish himself from Charles' brother James (later James II), and so I will call him here.) I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about the Stuarts in this time period. It's both extremely readable and seems quite well researched (by which I mean that
selenak has very few nitpicks about it). Morgan makes the people of this era come alive, so that they're real people to me, entangled in a web of relationships, rather than (as they'd been previously) a list of characters and titles tenuously related by anecdotes told to me in salon -- Minette (Charles's sister) and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, and their disastrous marriage, and Minette and Charles's relationship; James (II) and the ways in which he was awful and was clearly on a path to disaster once he became king; William of Orange and Mary (James (II)'s daughter) and their arranged-to-love marriage and how they related to Charles and James and Jemmy; Jemmy himself, obviously, and the way he related to all of these people, and overall to Charles II himself, and a lot more as well. This can be read with no knowledge of the era or the people; I'd had the salon synopsis (see the first few comments), but could be read without that. I feel that Morgan tries to make the presentation as balanced as possible given that Jemmy is the narrator (probably to the extent of making Jemmy more understanding than he might have been in real life), but Jemmy does have strong feelings about things. (For example, I came away with very strong negative feelings about Philippe, who doesn't seem to have been a super nice person anyway but who was at least incrementally nicer to his second wife, which one wouldn't have known from reading this book, since Jemmy wasn't related to the second wife.)
2. Game of Queens (Gristwood) - Nonfiction book about the 16th century, focusing on the queens: beginning with Isabella the Catholic and going down to Queen Elizabeth of England. It was highly recommended by
selenak here. Now, I will say that I think I don't know enough (basically zero) about this era for this kind of survey book to be ideally suited to my learning about it -- all the early queens in the book (Anne de Beaujeu, Louise of Savoy -- Margaret of Austria being something of an exception because she's so very cool) are honestly kind of blending together for me aside from a few disjointed facts, a couple of months after reading it. However, I'm still glad I read it, because the next time I encounter these women I'll have more context for them (and it's already happened a couple of times in salon that they've been referenced and I was like "oh right!"). Once the book got to Mary Tudor, Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth, I was on much more familiar ground (even when I didn't know details, I at least had a fair bit more knowledge about the contextual history of Henry VIII and so on), and so I found those parts much easier going.Anyway, I still recommend this! Just, it's easier to read if one is even vaguely familiar with the period, and I found the Morgan novel a better way to quickly ingest a large quantity of information about a period I knew very little about.
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Date: 2022-04-21 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-23 06:00 pm (UTC)