Sex with the Queen

Image sourced from here

If you want to learn about royal history across Europe, over hundreds of years, this book and it's predecessor Sex with Kings, are the books for you.

I really enjoy this author. She has a way of taking history and making it fun. A lot of that is through her writing and prose, it's accessible and doesn't feel like you are reading a history book. She also has a way of writing about the subjects which make them feel more like characters in fiction than real people. I guess you can say that in some ways, royals are.

This book takes us through the halls of palaces in Germany, England, Russia, France, Spain and Italy looking at the women who were the most powerful women in their lands. And the things they got up to either in secret or with everyone's knowledge. She handles her subjects with grace and dignity, and without judgement.

Until.

Until we hit Diana. Then you can feel the judgement and almost scorn seeping out of the pages. Which was so so disappointing when the rest of the book was handled very differently. It left an icky taste in my mouth, wishing that I had stopped reading that chapter earlier. So I recommend that you all read the book, but stop that chapter earlier.

Day Watch

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In October I read Night Watch, for a Kazakhstan/Russian read. I picked up the sequel, Day Watch, as I enjoyed it so much. This book follows on, but instead of focusing on the Night Watch, it, as the name suggests focuses on the Day Watch. However I found this slightly not the case, as the stories frequently flick from the Day Watch agent's perspective to that of previously met Night Watch agents. Where as you felt in Night Watch that he liked his characters, does not seem to feel that way about the Day Watch and seems to keep running back to the previous characters he prefers more.

I noted the technology being dated a lot more in this book. I know they were walking around Moscow with minidisc players in the last book, but I viewed it as a quirk. However the running to their desktops to open Netscape to start searching made me laugh. Mental note to self, if ever I write a book, don't mention operating systems or search engines. In a few years they seem ridiculously out of date.

But it was still fun, just not as much. But you get taken further than Moscow in this volume, passing into the Crimea, Ukraine and Prague. I still will read the other two though. I still love the style of writing, the Russian tone. Cannot get enough of it.

Anna Karenina - #23

I don't know what to think of this book. It's a conundrum.

It is brilliantly written. Hands down, no arguments at all. It is immersive and, just, well... beautiful. I was sitting on my back steps the other day  in the blazing Canberra spring (spring can be blazing here, trust me). I was leaning up against the brick wall, sitting on the concrete, with a view of the Brindabella mountains and a gin and tonic as it was so warm, with magpies singing and cockatoos squarking around me. But for the first time I could remember in a very long time, I was so sucked into the writing I felt like I was in a dingy Muscovite hotel, in winter in 1870 or so. The only thing that brought me back was a chicken jumping into my lap. I was astounded, once I had recovered from my confusion and slight shock from a big black chook snuggling into me.

Because of this, I wanted to keep on reading. But I wanted to keep on reading something worth reading. Tolstoy reminds me of a brilliant painter, who only paints still life. While the technique and result is breathtaking, you can't help get over the fact they have only painted a bowl of fruit. Over and over again.

Now don't get me wrong, some of the characters Tolstoy creates are fantastic. I shouldn't of loved Oblonsky but I did. I thought he was wonderful. I liked Anna right until the end. Then she went all weird. Even Vronsky I grew to like, although I didn't find him attractive (too many moustaches and bald spots for me).

But the story... You do want to know what happens to Anna and whether she gets everything to work or not  (although Russian novel should indicate that to you at the start). But if I hear one more thing about hunting or farming I think I will scream. I know that Tolstoy had all these great ideas and that this was how gentleman passed them on to the masses if they couldn't write an interesting essay. Whack a story around your philosophy! But sometimes I think he was trying to be too clever (like the 3 pages inside the mind of the dog. Slightly left field...) or too preachy (the entire last part with Levin).

However, his ability to completely convey what is happening inside peoples' minds is pretty remarkable. Anna's ... how to say this non-spoilery... "journey" at the end of the book while perfectly conveys that way of thinking, however a little too well as I just wanted to shake her and yell "Pull yourself together woman!!" I didn't like her at the end of the book. But I think because she was so real and believable and there is a reason I am not a practising psych.

There was much that I missed with this book, which is fair enough really at over 800pp. Watching this episode of the First Tuesday Book Club again after finishing the book highlighted this (sorry I can't find a youtube link to this one). Thank you Richard Flanagan for explaining the doctor in Kitty's bedroom scene in a way my mind never went to. Makes complete sense, that the doctor may have been, umhum... "servicing" her, in 1870 or there abouts, I just never made the leap (the man has read the book too many times, or enough times I guess).

Back to my conundrum. I didn't love the story, so I want to give it a 3. But I loved the writing, so I want to give it a 4. But 3.5, doesn't sit well with me. But it is the diplomatic thing to do. Also, it looks like the movie has cut out Levin and Kitty completely. I was wondering how they were going to make it 2.5 hours long. Anyway, compromising with 3.5 horrible Jude Law moustaches.

Night Watch - #19

I’m so behind on my reviews! I decided not to review all my overseas reading at once like I did in June, but this means I’m reading faster than I am reviewing and not catching up! So I think I need to throw that idea out the window.

So, Night Watch. This was going to be my Russian read. Then I had the brilliant idea of reading Anna Karenina as my Russian read (which I haven’t finished yet), and as Sergei Lukyanenko was born in a part of the USSR that is now Kazakhstan, this became my Kazakhstani read instead. Brilliant playing of the system, however confusing when all the stories are set in Moscow.

I say stories as the book is pretty much 3 stories of around 150pp each, featuring the same characters and building on the events of the story before it. I loved it. It was a play on the supernatural domains that I hadn’t read before, with a distinctly European twist. It had magic and wizards and such, but without the kitchness that the fantasy genre tends to fall into.

The basic premise is that there is light and dark magic. When one finds out they are a magic user, or Other, they have to make a choice between whether they are light or dark. But there is more to it than it seems, as a lot of the time it comes down to the circumstances that the person is in the first time they enter the Twilight (the magical realm). Ie, you’re in a bad mood, you may end up on the dark side because of that, not because you are inherently bad.

Light and Dark are in a permanent truce with each other. In order to police this truce, we have the Night Watch of light magicians who monitor the Dark, the Day Watch who are dark magicians who monitor the Light, and the Inquisition who monitor and police them both. This book was stories about, funnily enough, the Night Watch (the second in the series is conveniently called the Day Watch and confusingly the third is called Twilight Watch so not sure on that one).

I wanted to read this book badly after we had heard such good things about it in Aus, and then they released the movie before any of us had read the book. And the movie was shocking. Absolutely appalling. Which meant even more that we had to read the book. There is no way this acclaimed book could have been that bad.

It wasn’t, it was great. The movie it turns out is based just on the first of the three stories. This meant that the characters where pretty underdeveloped in the movie. Turns out, because you have another 350pp in the book to get to know them. The strange reasoning in the movie gets explained in the book. Another reason why some books are just better left as books.

The moral to this particular story is to pretend the movie doesn’t exist. It’s how we get on with our lives. So pretend the movie never happened and read the book. The book has a wonderful spin on light and dark, good and evil, highlighting the fact that they are sometimes blurred, incomprehensible and indistinguishable, even to those inside the system. 4 stars.

Between Shades of Gray - #14

I am actually still reading Anna Karenina. But some of the lovely people who are doing the Around the World Challenge invited me to do their own 24 hour challenge for the weekend. It is all Olympic in theme, and therefore I am reading European books for Team Europe today. Also means no time for relevant pictures for my post.

I picked this up at the start which was midnight my time last night. I ripped through 8 chapters before bed. This quick amount of reading annoyed me. I hate the fact that people who are writing from young adults or children feel like that is an excuse to write badly. Or that if they write badly, then they change their audience to young adults and children. I think that is patronising. And not to mention I feel this must just turn off kids from reading. Thank you J.K. Rowling for cementing this trend (although she obviously didn't turn kids off reading but is a terrible writer).

And that's what I felt with the first 60pp of this book. However picking it up again this morning has made me change my mind somewhat. I couldn't for the life of me work out how we were going to see a happy ending to the book, or even an ending. I was pleasantly surprised that it was accomplished.

The story is of Lina, her brother and her mother who are Lithuanians who are taken from their homeland by the secret Soviet police/military and then are forced in to work camps and hard labour in Russia and Siberia. This occurs during WWII and you have this interesting insight again (like in Purge) of the people dealing with Stalin and hoping that Hitler will save them, only to realise that Hitler is just a monster from the West, as opposed to one from the East.

I feel so sorry for the people of Eastern Europe. They seem to have been forgotten by us in the West after we dealt with Hitler and the Japanese. As long as people were not attacking us and people like us (US, UK, Aus, France, Germany, Austria etc), we were kind of happy to leave them be behind their Iron Curtain. Where is seems that those people who fell on the wrong side of the curtain endured the horrible crimes that existed in the War for 40 years longer. That to me seems inexcusable...

But back to the book. It picked up pace, the flashbacks began to fit, and the writing  began to flow. Despite the few typos (what is with editors these days?) it was an enjoyable YA read. A great introduction to the horrors of the Soviet regime. Well great and enjoyable as it can be in the circumstances. 2.5 stars.

Not Dead ... Yet

Just in case anyone was wondering. Not dead, stuck in Russia. Which some may argue is the same thing...

To tie you over until Anna and I finish with one another, have a picture of a girl and a camel.