Read on its own, this is fine, but it's impossible not to compare it to Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic, which is much better. Spoiler: Garfield's assassination doesn't have that much to do with Oneida, but I guess the publishers couldn't resist getting “sex cult“ into the title.

IN MARCH 1912 a strange accident occurred in Naples harbour during the unloading of a large ocean-going liner which was reported at length by the newspapers, although in extremely fanciful terms.

-- Stefan Zweig, _Amok_

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

I found this bio pretty fascinating -- by which I mean I could barely put it down even while trying to meet a work deadline. James VI and I was a terrible husband, an indifferent father, & a fickle, feckless romantic companion to several men (although he did enrich & elevate his favorites). His reign wasn't a disaster, but he wasn't a great king & it's easy to see how it opened cracks that led to the English Revolution only a few years later.

I wasn't expecting this, but this book was easily one of the best books I've read this year -- lucid, witty, well-written. I learned a ton about revolutionary England and my interest was held the whole time. Would make a great follow-up to Lucy Wooding's Tudor England: A History.

“It was heaven on earth--and, some whispered, the devil's garden.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

Extremely bleak domestic drama that explores climate change in near-future Florida. This is not one of the Boyle's great works but it is very much of its time. It's easy to imagine a 22nd-century American Studies prof assigning this in a Trump/Biden era cultural history class.

Not the typical #SundaySentence but Jonathan Healey's comment on Cromwell's foreign policy made made me laugh: “Suffering a bout of Elizabethan nostalgia, he decided to attack Spain.“ (In _The Blazing World_).

Thus concludes my monthslong tour of Elizabeth I's reign. This is well-researched and well-written, but the ground is (contra the title of the book) somewhat well-trod and Guy struggles to hide his fondness for Mary Queen of Scots.

Objectively, this is thoroughly reported and sensitively written, but I experienced it as spending an uncomfortable amount of time with the most toxic and unreasonable people I went to high school with.

“Probably the strangest way anyone celebrated the accession of King James I of England was when a gentlewoman in the far north of Lancashire organised a mock wedding in a country church, between two male servants.“

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Probably more suitable for someone who hasn't been obsessively reading about the Tudors for the last six months.

The premise is gripping -- I could not put this book down -- but the ending felt contrived to me. Still, Kuang is always interesting and the protagonist is one of the more compelling characters I've read this year.

Not my favorite Baker novel -- that remains Longbourn -- but well-told and consistently gripping.

“Once, more than half a century ago, he was the handsomest man in the world.“

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Look, it's not the author's fault that I have followed this story obsessively for seven years, but honesty compels me to report that I just didn't see much new in this book.

Reminiscent of Henry James but more readable. This was my first Elizabeth Bowen and I was impressed with her depiction of Portia and the society that surrounds her.

This was . . . fine? It just never rose to the heights of Madeline Miller's Circe, and suffered in comparison.

I read this (gasp) thirty-five years ago in high school and decided to revisit it. I was really pleased with how well it holds up! Meticulously detailed, so you have to really commit to understanding the finer points of Scottish history, but well-written. And it's hard to be bored when there are so many moments that feel like they were ripped from a modern soap opera.

“Now it's the first decade of the twenty-first century, space-time is denser, it's crowded, you can barely move because the air is so packed with this and that. You can't get away from people: they're in touch, they're touching, they're only a touch away. Is that better, or worse?“

#SundaySentence

Three brilliantly crafted longish short stories, each dealing with death and memory in some way. Made me long to read more Porter.

“I see you. I see all those who men call monsters.

“And I see the men who call them that. Call themselves heroes, of course.

“I only see them for an instant. Then they're gone.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

Somewhat to my surprise, I did not love this. The writing is lively & engaging and there's certainly plenty to say about the Dudleys; but I was frustrated by the handling of Amy Robsart's death. (I do not think Dudley killed her.)

I was interested in a novel about celebrity and fandom in the twenty-first century, and that's what this is -- but I wanted something more grounded and less abstract. Didn't love the way this story was told.

I have read a shocking number of Elizabeth I bios in my time, and this one is my favorite. Comprehensive but still an absolute pleasure to read.

I _really_ struggled with the dialect but this book hooked me in the second half and I ended up falling in love with it. Janie is a wonderful protagonist. Pro-tip: Read it in big chunks if you can.

Maaaaybe a little bit pat in the end but I just could not get over how beautifully written it was. The kind of book that makes you want to just luxuriate in its sentences. For a 184-page book, that's enough.

I really loved this portrait of a town in the 1930s. It's a political/social novel so not all the characters are as developed as I would have liked them to be, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

“That morning‘s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

Comprehensive but oddly-paced -- Spawforth is apparently a lateral thinker and there's not really a clear chronology even though it's billed as a biography. Lots of great anecdotes, though.

Don Carlos, Philip II's son, contemplated as a match for Mary Queen of Scots, sounds like a real winner: “He had always been an unpromising youth, but in 1562 his 'natural imbecility' had been aggravated by brain damage incurred when he had fallen downstairs while chasing a maidservant.“

Every biography of Elizabeth I devotes pages and pages to the question of why she never married but honestly I feel like “My father had my mother and one of my stepmothers beheaded“ serves as an adequate reason. That is not a great introduction to the institution of matrimony!

“The koels began to call before daylight. Their voices rang out from the dark trees like an arrangement of bells, calling and echoing each others‘ calls, mocking and enticing each other into ever higher and shriller calls.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

I actually loved this book -- very engagingly written and Cecil himself is as vivid as any fictional protagonist. Highly recommended if you're interested in how Elizabeth's court functioned.

You can definitely see Elif Batuman's influence (she blurbs it and is thanked in the acknowledgements) but I actually enjoyed this more than I usually enjoy Batuman's work. Interesting portrait of a frustrating protagonist.

“On Friday Penguin Random House confirmed that an unpublished Gabriel García Márquez novel – titled En Agosto Nos Vemos, (We‘ll See Each Other in August) – not only exists, but will be on shelves across Latin America in 2024.“

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/28/gabriel-garcia-marquez-unseen-nove...

“How could we deprive them of the daughters they raised to become their allies, their cellmates in the prison called life, because we want to not only have but also to show off having the freedom and happiness that they never did?“

#SundaySentence

“She might have been waiting for her lover. For three quarters of an hour she had sat on the same high stool, half turned from the counter, watching the swing door.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

You think you've picked up an accessible narrative history, and then Jurgen Habermas shows up in the first paragraph.

Still working my way through this book, I have reached 1970 and learned that Candice Bergen's mother got very huffy about what she wore to the Oscars. I disagree, to my mind this is the Platonic ideal of 1970s Oscars regalia. 10/10, no notes. My only regret is that I cannot find a less blurry image.

Thirty pages in this is wildly entertaining. So far I have learned that Douglas Fairbanks turned pale and wept when his wife Mary Pickford had the audacity to cut her hair (men are so _emotional_, amirite?) and that on the set of one early talkie, the microphone was hidden in the false hump of a man playing a hunchback, which he swung back and forth between the other actors when they were speaking.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,“ Jane Austen famously wrote in _Pride and Prejudice_. Two hundred years later, Margaret Atwood offered a riposte from the other side: “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

This is grim:

“Magellan‘s crew, confined aboard their ships, relied on worm-eaten biscuits and flying fish that landed on the decks. They slowly succumbed to scurvy, which Magellan and other officers escaped by accident. Because of their rank, they were entitled to an allocation of jam made from quince, a tart little fruit rich in vitamin C. Without realizing how or why, those who had access to quince were protected.“

“To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished.“

#SundaySentence

“Even by royal standards, the family into which the future Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638 was a nest of vipers.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

An absorbing, brutal novel about Nigeria. Hard to read at times but worth the effort. The characters felt real and I grew quite attached to some of them; Wuraola especially has my heart.

Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion, but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, ‘Collecting material‘. No one can object to that.

#SundaySentence

I enjoyed this social satire quite a bit -- it's well-written and witty, if dated in its treatment of women and occasionally offensive language.

“The headmaster‘s wife twisted herself round in her chair to talk to Mrs Morland, who was sitting in the row just behind her. ‘I can‘t make out,‘ she said reflectively, ‘why all the big boys seem to be at the bottom of preparatory schools and the small ones at the top.'“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

Went in completely blind. I don't know what I expected but this wasn't it -- still, I loved it to bits and plan to read it again in, oh, I don't know, thirty years or so.

“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.“

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday