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 […]
Six Tudor Queens: Anne Boleyn, A King's Obsession by Alison Weir
One of my great guilty pleasures these days is books and media related to Tudor history. It feels like a very specific combination of nerdy and basic to admit that you are super into Anne Boleyn and friends (too obvious for your average history buff, too esoteric for everyone else). But oh boy am I into it. The story of Henry the Eighth and his many wives has got more sex, death and twists than a soap opera and the best thing is that it […]
I was fascinated by Anne Boleyn as a child. I saw a production of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, probably on Masterpiece Theater and was entranced by the idea of a queen who was executed by her King. My recent review of It Ended Badly reminded me that I had bought The Creation of Anne Boleyn after reading Gabby N’s CBR8 review, earlier this year. I didn’t realize how little is really known about Anne Boleyn. Susan Bordo examines the popular portrayals of Anne […]
This book deserves a better-written review than it’s going to receive from me, since I read it at the beginning of the year, didn’t write a review, and now it’s December 30th. My own damn fault. This is the sequel to Wolf Hall, the story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell (and, at about the same time, Anne Boleyn). The king and Cromwell are staying with the Seymours at their home, Wolf Hall (which made me wonder why the first book was called that, since […]
