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.

What the Day Owes the Night - #20

Next!

Moving on from the wintry and chilling images of supernatural Muscovites, I picked up this novel of the Algerian revolution. The story starts with a boy called Younes, an Algerian boy, witnessing his family losing his family's lands. After a steep decline from that point onwards, his father ends up asking his uncle who has been educated in the West and married to a French woman, to look after Younes and raise him as his own. Younes then becomes Jonas, as he moves from a life of a poor Arab boy to one of wealth and privilege within the educated and colonial elite in Algeria.

We then follow Jonas as he then negotiates the world where his ethnic group is viewed as only servants and possessions, and while these downtrodden people are plotting to take Algeria back for the Algerians. He then has to deal with the consequences of teenage passion, as well as meeting a beautiful girl who drives his group of friends apart. Girls trump ethnic uprisings as deal breakers. Apparently.

I picked this book up now as it was the October read for a group on African Lit. But the benefit of reading it while I was travelling, was I ended up reading it while I was in Paris, and Algeria was colonised by the French. I think this helped the mood somewhat. Ignoring that the book was in the desert and it was 8 degrees in Paris, the Frenchness oozed through into the book.

Otherwise, as I know not everyone is as lucky to be able to read this in Paris, it was a wonderfully written book. But it was accessibly beautiful. Not like reading a book of poetry. It was able to transport you to feel like you were lying on an African Mediterranean beach, even if you were sitting in a freezing cold, open Parisian train station where the French do not believe in seats and so you have to perch on top of your suitcase for 2 hours... >.> ... /end rant.

Also, you could feel the split poor Jonas was feeling between his background and supporting his people (including his family) and maintaining the status quo. I wonder if I ended up feeling this more acutely than the character did in the end. As if I was projecting my own emotions, and ignoring his slightly. But to throw his lot in with the revolution could have separated Jonas from everything that was now his life. That must be heartbreaking.

What I did have a problem with was the romance. I didn't buy the dilemma. I'm sorry. I didn't get it. Therefore, sympathy for decisions made in this regard just wasn't there. And seeing it was what half the book was about, that just annoyed me. So due to that annoyance of the story, it took me down to a 3.5. I'm sure other people won't be as annoyed, but it just detracted from the rest of the book to be annoyed with half the story.

The Zahir - #16

I am just going to come out and say it.

Paulo Coelho is a knob.

I dislike this man, his opinions and his writing. I have read The Alchemist and The Fifth Mountain in the past and have felt that they were completely over rated. Then a friend links all these "insightful" quotes from him all the time on Facebook. And then there is this article from earlier this month. But all of these were forgivable. Until I read this book. This book lead me to one conclusion.

Paulo Coelho is a complete wanker.

This book, The Zahir, is about an amazing author who is famous, incredibly successful with the ladies, intelligent, accomplished, and did I mention a brilliant writer? Maybe I need to tell you again how good a writer the author is. He is married, but has many girlfriends as he is incredibly attractive, and his wife who is a journalist goes missing. He mopes for a bit, while being a brilliant, amazing writer, but then gets an actress girlfriend. He then gets approached by a man who knows where his wife is, and he has to rediscover himself, by writing another ground-breaking book and some other stuff, before he can go find her. But the actress stays with him until he leaves, because he's great.

In case you forget how wonderful he is, he points out randomly how many languages (nearly all the languages in the world) he has been translated into. The books themselves, while wonderful, are not him or his ideas. 'Everything that's written in my books is part of my soul...' (p101). Yeah right. Get your hand off it.

Also he mentions the Zimbardo prison experiment at one stage, because he can. Why? No idea. It wasn't important or necessary. It was in fact completely out of place, not to mention wrong, and seemed to be mentioned to show off how intelligent he was.

My "favourite" part, was after he came home from spending all night out wandering Paris with the "Tribe" and then come home and didn't want to turn on the tv because they had "run out of things to talk about" so were covering a story of a rebellion in Haiti. So he goes on this whole rant about how is a rebellion important to him as a rich, incredibly successful author in Paris! Who cares! I just wanted to slap him the narrow minded prick! Urgh.

As well as all of this he seems incredibly unhinged as well. He screams at his girlfriend after being out all night with the Tribe, mentioned above, and she doesn't ask him where he was. So therefore as she is not jealous (not interested, jealous) he screams at her for not loving him any more. Besides the fact he has been moaning on about his wife who he loves who has left him for the whole book. I was beyond loving him at p5, no wonder the girlfriend seemed to have had enough by p200. But she hadn't really. She really thought he was great. You know why? Because this unnamed author is fucking fantastic, just ask him.

Why did I finish it? Because I wanted to find out what happened to his wife and girlfriend as I liked them (not worth it, it ended all about him), it was only 270pp, and it was orange (for a rainbow challenge). It gets 1.5 stars as it was well written for self-congratulatory masturbation. Actually, no. After writing this, 1.

Knob.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog - #6

We went to Singapore for a week. My work had a conference there, so we decided to buy another ticket and take a week off. Once you get on a plane for 8 hours (or 9 if you include the transfer to Sydney), you better bloody well have a holiday I think. The benefit however of living on an island where the closest neighbour is 4 hours away (which is closer than flying to the other side of the "island"), is that it gives you lots of time to read. The draw back is that with the data roaming charges being what they are, I'm going to be spending this week playing catch up.
....
I really don't have anything to complain about.

Anyways, Hedgehogs. Elegant ones.

This book had been on my "to-read" list for a while. I don't know why exactly. I think it was because it was one of those books that popped up everywhere, without any real reviews I could see. It had a nice cover. And it mentioned hedgehogs. I have read books for more ridiculous reasons.

This book sort of screamed self-indulgence for the first third of the book. The two main characters were incredibly intelligent. Like brain bleedingly so. But then they just tried as hard as they could to conceal it. I personally cannot fathom that. I feel that I am surrounded by stupidity so often, that intelligence should be embraced, encouraged and waved in everyone's faces.

What I ended up feeling like with this book was that the author made the characters that way to show off how clever *she* was. So maybe the waving it in everyone's face is a little obnoxious. All I wanted to do was shake her and yell "Yes! We all get how clever you are. Get on with the damn story!!"

Thank god someone listened and in comes Mr Kakuro Ozu who finally makes the book interesting, makes the book likable and somehow wiggles a plot out of the rest of the book. Everyone at 7 Rue de Grenelle is fascinated and in awe of him, and you as a reader are too. 1. Because he is infinitely likeable and a great human being, and 2. because he's made the 100 or so pages you have just struggled through worthwhile.

We had a ... lively discussion... over the book title in Sydney Airport. I said it was because hedgehogs are elegant in their own little way. My partner thought that this was ridiculous, and that it must be some metaphor on how something really wasn't elegant at all. It resulted in a "HAH!" moment when I came across:
“Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary--and terrible elegant.” 

Take that Mr Hedgehogs-aren't-elegant. 3.5 stars from me.

Next: Japan with Norwegian Wood