Astronomical Observations

Halfway through Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto, my son is still enthralled by the story of discovery of Kuiper-belt objects. Kudos to Mr. Brown for his skill in making this astronomy accessible and interesting enough to hold the attention of a stubbornly non-book 11-year-old boy. And his mother. (Will you lose all respect for me, dear reader, if I admit I did not know what the Kuiper belt was until I read about it in this book? I even had to look it up so I could pronounce it correctly.)

Meanwhile, I am halfway through Edith Pargeter’s massive Brothers of Gwynedd. More than once, as the dramatic story thread has seemed to get lost in more prosaic history retelling (and hey, I’m a big fan of history), I have worried I might just put the book down. (Dear reader, I have done this many times before. My attention span is not what it once was.) But I haven’t! I feel compelled to keep turning the page (or in this case, pushing the “Next Page” button on my Kindle). I even know what will happen, having recently read Marc Morris’s biography of Edward I, and it isn’t nice. All this to say, I can’t give enough credit to Pargeter’s masterly writing style. She’s just that good.

Reading update

I realize that I have been acting something like a tease. I wrote about how I ordered and almost finished Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Crossing to Paradise and how I checked out Jean Ferris’s Twice Upon a Marigold, but I didn’t write about how I finished both books or how I felt about them once I was done.

So, here’s the report. I enjoyed both books very much, and finished them in pretty good time considering the sad lack of time I have for reading these days. (Maybe I’m spending too much time blogging???) Crossing to Paradise was not as stirring as the earlier, related Arthur series (oh, how I missed Arthur—one of the most endearing characters I’ve ever read); but it makes a nice stand-alone, historical novel. I was tickled at how it referred back to the Arthur series, and how the ending satisfyingly tied up some loose ends in the Arthur series. I breezed through Twice Upon a Marigold, and found Ferris’s humor just as good as in the previous book, Once Upon a Marigold. At first I kept thinking to myself, “What a nice job she does getting a Message across through her charming story and humor,” but by the end of the book I began to feel that maybe the candy-coating on the message was wearing a bit thin. Overall, still an enjoyable read.

I have now entered a more “serious” phase of reading, having begun David Starkey’s Six Wives, about the queens of England’s Henry VIII. I keep hearing Starkey’s voice in my head as I read, having recently watched most of the PBS series Monarchy (ack, I have one last episode to go—thank goodness for Netflix and no due dates). I admit I am a history buff; but I have to say that for interest and readability, novels have nothing on the best popular history books of the last several years. Today I also picked up my inter-library loan copies of two books about Christopher Marlowe. I began reading the first in the dentist’s office just this afternoon. I promise to write reports on these books when I finish, though it may be a while, as Six Wives alone has more than 700 pages. To paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara: I won’t go hungry for quite some time.

More monarchs

Last night’s view of Monarchy was all about Henrys and Edwards, with a couple of Richards for good measure. Strong kings, weak kings, wars and murder. The history started to feel like those chapters in Kings in the Bible: so and so was good, so and so was bad.

And then there was King John.

History aside, my view of King John (reigned 1199–1216) will forever be colored by the 1973 Disney version of Robin Hood, in which John is represented as a whining, thumb-sucking lion without a mane, and voiced to hilarious perfection by Peter Ustinov (“Power! Power!”; “Do you savoir a faire, il y a, n’est pa?” Cracks me up every time.) They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

John makes a more serious, behind-the-scenes appearance in the wonderful Arthur and the Seeing Stone series by Kevin Crossley-Holland. These are my absolute favorite contemporary King Arthur books: The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing Places, and King of the Middle March. Crossley-Holland is a prose-poet who melds the traditional Arthur stories with the story of young Norman Arthur de Caldicot. Read them! Read them!

A couple of years ago, I read one other book in which King John plays a hefty role: Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman. The book is about John’s illegitimate daughter, Joan, and her marriage to the Welsh Prince Llewellyn (the Great). In Penman’s book, John is shown mostly as a womanizer and a king desperate to hold on to power.

Of course the real King John is known as the guy who was forced to sign the Magna Carta, the Great Charter, which set out boundaries for the king’s power vis-a-vis his barons. Today the Magna Carta is famous for its early delineating of what we call basic human rights.

A is for Anglophile

Last night I watched Episode 1 of Monarchy with David Starkey. It is a series about the British monarchy from Anglo-Saxon times through the Restoration. Why did I watch this?

1. I am a nerd (maybe even a super-nerd, according to my youngest sister).
2. I find the subject of the history of England’s monarchy interesting (see #1).
3. My husband was out of town.

The episode I watched began with the Anglo-Saxon incursions after the fall of the Roman empire. No mention of King Arthur, alas, but I guess I don’t need to feed my obsession with things Arthurian. Instead Starkey focused on the Anglo-Saxon rulers, of which there were many overlords of separate small kingdoms, but no one ruler over all the island. In the late 800s, the Danes (“Vikings”) swept over England, wiping out all but one of these small kingdoms, which was Wessex under the rule of Alfred. Alfred and his successors eventually reclaimed the land taken by the Danes and established the first unified kingdom. For anyone who wants to read more about this period in history, I recommend Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles (fiction). His series focuses on a young warrior, Uhtred, who is English but captured and fostered by the Danes. What I like about this series is how Cornwell shows sympathy with both sides of the conflict between Dane and English. (By the way, for King Arthur fans, Cornwell also has an excellent series beginning with The Winter King.)

I knew virtually nothing about the next periods of English history, during which the Danes returned and defeated Ethelred (the Unready), to take control of the kingdom in the early 11th century. The interesting note here is that Ethelred’s widow, Emma, who was of Norman blood (seems Ethelred had tried to pacify the Normans when he saw his kingdom in danger from both Normans and Danes), knew a thing or two about politics and power. After Ethelred’s death, she married the Danish conqueror, Canute. Two of Emma’s sons and two of her stepsons ended up as kings of England in the turmoil following Canute’s death. Her great-nephew, William the Conqueror, achieved the Norman conquest in 1066. I don’t know of any fiction about Emma. I’ll have to look into that.

After Starkey’s overview of the Norman conquest came some discussion of the Norman assimilation (or lack of it), and King Henry I’s cathedral- and castle-building. I started to doze here—not Starkey’s fault!

The last bit was on the anarchy following the death of Henry I, and the civil war between King Stephen and Queen Matilda (also known as Maude), in the early 12th century. This civil war is the backdrop for Ellis Peters’ terrific mystery series featuring Brother Cadfael, the crusader-turned-monk. I highly recommend this series for history buffs; for me the history trumps the mystery. Of course Brother Cadfael is an endearing, enduring character (played by Derek Jacobi in the PBS Mystery versions); but my favorite character is the Sheriff Hugh Beringar (read One Corpse Too Many, The Virgin in the Ice, and Dead Man’s Ransom to find out why).

Tonight: The medieval monarchs (my nerdiness is not sated yet).