Top Ten Tuesday: Questions I Would Ask My Favorite Authors

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about questions we'd ask our favorite authors. Not all of these authors are my absolute favorites (for one, I only chose authors who are alive), but here are ten questions I'd ask authors I respect and admire!

Roxane Gay: What was your favorite thing about living in the Upper Peninsula during your Ph.D. program?

Margaret Atwood: You've written so many brilliant modern classics. What modern classic means the most to you?

Alison Weir: What person in British Tudor history would you like to write a biography about, but there just isn't enough material there for a book?

Jeffrey Eugenides: What is your favorite place in Detroit?

Katherine Arden: What is your favorite Russian folk tale?

Donna Tartt: Your The Secret History is one of the most popular books not yet adapted for the the screen. Has there ever been an actor you thought would be perfect for one of the roles?

John U Bacon: Who is your favorite Michigan football player of all time?

George RR Martin: When are you going to finish The Winds of Winter?

Nick Hornby: Music was such an important part of High Fidelity. What is your favorite song?

Erik Larson: Is there a historical event or person that you find interesting, but you don't think you're the right person to write about?

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Top Ten Tuesday: Questions I Would Ask My Favorite Authors

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’ve Read the Most Books By

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about our most-read authors. This was actually kind of challenging to put together since Goodreads took their "most read authors" feature away, but here are the authors I'm pretty sure I've read the most, in descending order.

Charlaine Harris: All of the books of the Southern Vampire Mysteries put her firmly on top of my list.

J.K. Rowling: This feels cringey right now, to be honest. Trans women are women, and her transphobia doesn't change that fact. Also unchanged is the fact that I've read all the Harry Potter books, The Casual Vacancy, and the first two Galbraith books. I do not intend to read her work any further beyond books I've already purchased, she doesn't need any more of my money.

Louise Rennison: The Georgia Nicolson series were great favorites of mine as a teenager. Such silly fun!

Philippa Gregory: I will never quit her Plantangenet/Tudor series, they are entertaining trash and I love them. 

Oliver Sacks: He's the reason I became a psychology major in college! I still have books of his I haven't read yet, and not all of his books are especially strong if I'm being honest, but I'm going to read all of them anyways. 

Nick Hornby: The more of his work I read, the more I find it hit and miss, but there's warmth and humor even in his lesser efforts that I always appreciate.

Alison Weir: I haven't responded well to her fiction efforts, but her non-fiction histories are very readable and I highly recommend them. 

Jane Austen: I've still got one more of hers to read!

George RR Martin: I would like The Winds of Winter now please and thank you!

Phillip Pullman: I extremely loved the three books of His Dark Materials, was only so-so on the first of the Book of Dust series and am hesitant to start the next because of the bad reviews!

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Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’ve Read the Most Books By

Book 193: The Lady Elizabeth

"She fixed Hertford with a regal glare and was gratified to see him wilt slightly under her gaze. Thus she had seen her father do, and it cheered her a little to know that she had inherited something of his formidable will and presence. This was what it was to be royal, she reflected, this mysterious power that could make others tremble; it was something that might prove useful in the future. But what use was the semblance of power without the substance? For when it came down to it, King’s daughter or no, she was just a helpless young orphan, with no choice but to do as she was told."

Dates read: November 29- December 4, 2017

Rating: 4/10

As blended families become more and more common, I'm often surprised to hear the amount of judgment people have for parents who have children with different partners. In my experience, it's certainly not unusual to know others who, like myself, have a half-sibling, but I still hear snippy comments fairly regularly about women who have children with different dads, or vice versa. Being generally unafraid of confrontation, I almost always let people know that they're talking to someone whose sister is actually her half-sister, and most people walk it back, but it seems like there's often a gut instinct to deride it as "low class", which is just total nonsense.

Indeed, one of the most admired women of all time is a product of such a household. Queen Elizabeth I had not one but TWO half-siblings! Actual royalty has been doing this for hundreds of years, it does not get more upper-crust than that. At least in the Tudors' case, though, it does create some issues, which Alison Weir explores in her novel about the childhood of that monarch, The Lady Elizabeth. It begins with some segments of Elizabeth's early childhood but really takes off shortly before the death of Henry VIII, and while it primarily focuses on the perspective of Elizabeth herself, we also see events through the eyes of her nursemaid, Kat, older half-sister Mary, and stepmother Katherine Parr, ending in Mary's death and Elizabeth's ascension to the throne.

The relationship Weir depicts between Mary and Elizabeth is...complicated. Mary was stripped of her royal title and proclaimed a bastard when Henry divorced Katherine of Aragon to wed Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn. Although this devastated both Katherine and Mary, Weir depicts the latter as having made a real effort to be kind and loving to her little half-sister, despite having been made a part of Elizabeth's service when she was born. Elizabeth, too, was made a bastard when her mother was executed, and the book depicts Mary as haunted by the allegations made during Anne's trial that Elizabeth was actually the offspring of one of Anne's alleged lovers. Once their brother Edward dies, there is too much between them, from that history to their differences in religious faith, for them to be close any longer, and it is only Elizabeth's canny walking of a very thin line that keeps her from being disinherited.

I wish the book had focused more on this, and less on the salaciousness of the relationship between Elizabeth and her stepmother's new husband: Thomas Seymour. While it's certainly a significant factor in the period between her father's death and her own inheritance of the throne, and deserved to be explored, it got a little too bodice-ripping for my taste. There's historical record of some of the improprieties that occurred while Elizabeth lived with Katherine and Thomas, but Weir really makes it the centerpiece of the narrative and escalates it as high as she possibly can. We get endless scenes of Elizabeth's growing desire, of Kat's encouragement of the sparks between them, and it's like Weir is going for a kind of Philippa Gregory-esque fun prurience (I'm not trying to mock, I like Gregory's books) but forgot the fun part of it.

All in all, this was a second disappointment for me with Alison Weir and her fiction output. I read Innocent Traitor, about Lady Jane Grey, several months before I read this and while this one was better, they both fell flat for me. Her nonfiction histories do an admirable job of being informative but feeling light rather than heavy, making the people on the page come alive, but her fiction prose drags. There's just no spark there, and her characters feel boiled down to as few personality traits as possible. While I certainly intend to keep reading her nonfiction, I think this is my last stab at her fiction. I would not recommend this book.

One year ago, I was reading: Less 

Two years ago, I was reading: Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?

Three years ago, I was reading: The Lords of Discipline

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Book 193: The Lady Elizabeth

Top Ten Tuesday: Auto-Buy Authors

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about authors who you hear are coming out with a new book and it gets pretty much instantly added to your to-buy list. Not all of these authors are flawless, and they've written some stuff that I didn't care for in most cases, but I'm usually excited enough about how good they have the capacity to be that I'm willing to give them a chance straight away.

Margaret Atwood: I love her ability to build characters while weaving in powerful themes and compelling plots, and her work always gives me something to think about.

Neil Gaiman: His humor and sheer storytelling ability mean I'm always interested in what he writes.

Michael Chabon: He knows how to put together a family epic like no one else.

Kazuo Ishiguro: He's got a way of drawing you into a story and then just amping up the quiet tragedy bit by bit until you're devastated.

Jhumpa Lahiri: Her writing is always elegant without sacrificing the ability to hit an emotional knockout punch.

Alison Weir: I love royal histories, and that's what she does, using facts to create compelling narratives.

John U Bacon: I'm obsessed with Michigan football, and so is he.

Mary Roach: Her books aren't big serious stuff, but they're always interesting and bursting with humor and curiosity.

Lawrence Wright: He takes big, wide-ranging subjects and manages to put them into a narrative that pulls you along and helps you understand without feeling pedantic.

Jeffrey Toobin: When it comes to the legal and political systems, Toobin has the kind of panache and analysis I find super compelling.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Auto-Buy Authors

Book 140: The Children of Henry VIII

"There remained, however, the problem of what to do with the body. The Duke had hoped for a fortnight in which to gather his resources, but, since the weather was warm and the corpse already beginning to decay, this proved untenable. He could not leave the body in the King's chamber, yet nor could he risk an autopsy - which, in view of the current rumors, his colleagues might suggests which might reveal the arsenic in Edward's body."

Dates read: April 13-21, 2017

Rating: 7/10

The more I read about Henry VIII and the world into which he came, the more understandable he becomes. Instead of reading his serial marriages as the behavior of a man who refused to control his desires, it becomes obvious that, in significant part, the desire for a male heir to ensure the security of his bloodline was all-consuming and not unreasonable. After decades of brutal warfare between the Lancaster and York family lines, Henry was the product of a fragile new dynasty, and his failure to produce a viable heir could plunge England back into active hostilities. He needed a son, or better yet two, so that in the event that the first one didn't survive to produce heirs of his own (like Henry's own older brother Arthur), there would be someone to carry on the line.

These fears turned out to be both founded and unfounded. While he was absolutely correct to be worried about producing a son that would survive to adulthood, his failure to do so led directly to one of the most successful reigns in English history. In The Children of Henry VIII, Alison Weir focuses on the period between Henry's death and the beginning of Elizabeth's rule. This 11-year timespan saw three monarchs and a significant amount of instability, much of it driven by the religious schism between English Catholics longing to return to the old faith and Protestants wanting to protect their gains. With this book, Weir explores how Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey (Henry's grandneice), Mary I, and Elizabeth I interacted with each other, with the nobility, and with the levers of power.

In popular culture, there's a tendency to focus on Henry and then Elizabeth, with little if any thought to what happened in between. But there was a LOT of drama...Elizabeth's teenage sex scandal with her stepmother's husband, Edward's slow death from tuberculosis, complete with an artificial prolonging of his life to give courtiers more time to scheme to get another Protestant on the throne, Jane Grey's 19-day queenship, in which she was mostly a pawn to her parents and their co-conspirators, Mary's romantic obsession with her largely uninterested husband and her extended phantom pregnancy which everyone just apparently pretended never happened. Seriously! She went into confinement to have her baby and stayed there for months and then just disbanded it long after it should have been obvious that there wasn't going to be a baby.

As always, Weir has a keen sense of who her subjects are as people and gives them life rather than just dryly recounting the events of their life. We see Edward's haughty remove and strong religious conviction, Jane's helplessness as a pawn in a game she's not a player in, Mary's desperation to have a family of her own to love and fervent Catholic faith, and Elizabeth's intelligence and caution, constantly trying to balance on a wire. It's easy to see why Weir was inspired to write about Jane for her first stab at fiction, as her sympathy for the doomed teenager shines through brightly. She's clearly done her research and the book feels satisfying both as reading for information and reading for entertainment. I'd definitely recommend this book!

Tell me, blog friends...did you know that Elizabeth got into hot water with Katherine Parr's husband?

One year ago, I was reading: Butterfly Boy

Two years ago, I was reading: The White Tiger

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Book 140: The Children of Henry VIII

Book 137: Innocent Traitor

"When I open my eyes, I am still lying there. I realize, aghast, that not one person, not even my mother or my husband, has stirred to help me. Is that what being a queen will mean? I am alone, utterly alone, and will be so for the rest of my life. This realization is just too much to bear, and my composure breaks. Lying on the floor, I bury my head in my arms and fall to weeping piteously, great racking sobs tearing at my body. This is wrong, I know it! We must surely be damned to hell for all eternity, I along with them, even though I am forced to be their accomplice in this evil."

Dates read: March 30- April 4, 2017

Rating: 5/10

When I was in high school, I was on the mock trial team for three years. So when I became a lawyer, I went back and worked with them a bit. I was struck by how young they were, these 15 and 16 year olds. When I was that age, I was sure I was basically an adult, but coming from the perspective of actual adulthood, even less than a decade later, they were definitely not adults yet. But of course, cultural definitions of adulthood have shifted and changed over time. A couple hundred years ago, people of the same age would have been considered perfectly old enough to have jobs and be starting families.

Noble children in the late Middle Ages/early Renaissance, especially, were placed in a double bind: from the time they were old enough to appear in public, they were dressed as and expected to behave like tiny adults, but they were simultaneously completely at the mercy of their parents. Historian Alison Weir's first fictional novel, Innocent Traitor, illustrates the way this played out, by looking at the life of Lady Jane Grey. Known as the "Nine-Day Queen" when she's remembered at all, she was briefly crowned after the death of Edward VI, the son of Henry VIII. She was deposed quickly by Mary I and less than a year later, she was executed.

Weir tells Jane's story from several perspectives: her mother's, her cousins', her governess', and of course, her own, throughout her 19 year life. Weir depicts Jane's parents, Henry and Frances (herself the niece of King Henry VIII), as grasping social climbers deeply disappointed in Jane's gender. The couple are Protestants who raise their daughter (and later, her younger sisters) to follow in their religious footsteps. They are harsh parents, even by the standards of their time, but Jane herself grows into a quiet, obedient, and devout teenager (she is given a top-quality education and has the love of a devoted caretaker, Mrs. Ellen, which certainly helps). While it is hoped that she'll be considered a suitable bride for her cousin Edward VI, she is eventually married off to Guildford Dudley to form a political alliance. When the king finally succumbs to tuberculosis, her family, as well as her husband's and their allies, proclaim her queen on the grounds that Edward's sisters are bastards and therefore ineligible to inherit...and also to ensure that a Protestant monarch takes the throne rather than the rabidly Catholic Mary. When Mary musters troops, Jane is rapidly deposed and imprisoned. While Mary is initially inclined to show mercy, she eventually realizes that Jane makes too attractive a figurehead for Protestant foes and has her beheaded.

I love Alison Weir's histories...she has a light, lively touch with her subjects, creating a real sense of the person behind the recorded deeds. So I had high hopes for her fictional debut. But those hopes were disappointed. It's honestly not very good. Her characters are, for the most part, very one-dimensional: Jane and Mrs. Ellen are good, her parents and husband are bad. I found it jarringly anachronistic that Jane's wedding night rape is conceived as such by her...is "rape" even a word that would have been in common use then for someone of Jane's class? Especially to describe nonconsensual-but-within-wedlock sex (which was perfectly legal in many states in the US well into the 1900s)? Weir does not handle her multiple perspectives with particular skill and it often feels like just when you're getting into the groove of one character that it shifts to another.

Weir clearly feels a great deal of sympathy for her subject, and paints a picture of a life that seems cruelly harsh to a modern eye: abused and manipulated and finally killed. But from my own reading, it seems different more in degree than in kind for noble childhoods of the era: distant, uninvolved parents who expected their offspring to be seen and not heard and made plans for their future in order to create or cement alliances with other families. Jane's short life is certainly a tragedy and her father's continued scheming around her even after her imprisonment, without seeming consideration about putting her life in very real danger, certainly evinced an unusually high level of disregard for his child. But the book creates no real tension or interest in the interplay between characters...it's just waiting for the historical events to play out as you know they will. I have a few of her later novels still on my TBR because I think some of these issues are simply mistakes by a rookie novelist, but I can't affirmatively recommend this book.

One year ago, I was reading: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Two years ago, I was reading: The Shipping News

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Book 137: Innocent Traitor

Book 118: The Wars of the Roses

"From 1399 to 1499 the crown became the object of feuds, wars, and conspiracies, not because of a dearth of heirs, but because there were too many powerful magnates with a claim to the throne. During this period a new and disturbing element became involved in determining the royal succession: the prevalence of might over right. This brought a new awareness of the lack of statute law governing the succession and a debate as to whether the rights of a senior heir general, with a claim transmitted through a female, could take precedence over the rights of a junior heir male. But in the final analysis strength and success were what counted: an effective ruler was more likely to remain on the throne, however dubious his title. Weak or tyrannical rulers met with disaster."

Dates read: January 14-18, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Historical fiction is a genre I tend to enjoy, and one of the reasons why is that it introduces you to worlds you might have only known about through brief mentions in the classroom. I'm coming to enjoy non-fiction history a lot more as I get older, but I still really like my Phillipa Gregory (sorry not sorry). When getting introduced to a historical figure and period, I've usually just turned to old reliable Wikipedia. But even the most in-depth Wikipedia article can only tell you so much.

Ever since I first read her, Alison Weir has become one of my go-to historians. And as much as I enjoy the soap opera-esque The Cousin's War series (which I've read the first three of so far), Gregory is a fiction writer, and I know better than to trust her to teach me history. While I'd always been aware of the so-called Wars of the Roses in British history (I knew it was the Yorks and the Lancasters and it finally ended for good when the two houses intermarried and formed the House of Tudor), it doesn't tend to be taught in American schools. Which is why it's perfect that Weir has a whole book just about that period in English history: The Wars of the Roses.

It's a confusing story, to be sure: it seems like virtually every man in it is named Edward, Richard, or Henry, and they're all related to each other, besides. But Weir does her best to distinguish each of them, and she traces the conflicts not just from the point that they formally began, but from the point where they are rooted. The fighting doesn't get started until about halfway through, but it would be well nigh impossible to understand without all the preamble. She sets her stage carefully, and, much to my relief, when the fighting begins, it doesn't turn into a straight blow-by-blow battle narrative. I find descriptions of war maneuvers to be boring beyond measure, but Weir tells us enough to give us a sense of the battles but not make us feel like we're sitting through a military history lecture.

As always in Weir's work, it's well-sourced (she uses sources contemporary to the events being described, and traces language use back to ensure that she's giving the proper context to what was being reported) and well-written, with a definite sense of narrative and not just fact-dumping. One minor quibble, though, with this book is that it doesn't quite see the Wars through to what I thought to be their end: the ascension of Henry VII and his marriage to Princess Elizabeth of York. While I was hoping to get a bit more information about the end stages of the Wars, I definitely enjoyed getting Weir's take on the period she covered, and would recommend the book to others curious about this period of English history.

One year ago, I was reading: A Leg To Stand On

Two years ago, I was reading: Without You, There Is No Us

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Book 118: The Wars of the Roses

Book 105: Eleanor of Aquitaine

"She had inherited many of the traits of her forebears, and was energetic, intelligent, sophisticated, headstrong, and perhaps lacking in self-discipline. She possessed great vitality and, according to William of Newburgh, a lively mind. Impetuous to a fault, she seems to have cared little in her youth for the conventions of the society in which she lived. Sharing many qualities with that company of ambitious, formidable, and strong-minded female ancestors, she was to surpass them all in fame and notoriety." 

Dates read: November 15-21, 2016

Rating: 8/10

It's easy to forget that the world didn't always look like what it looks like today. Obviously, everyone knows that Egypt now is different than Ancient Egypt, but what we think about tends to be the cultural differences between them. The very borders of what land was considered Egypt aren't the same. So, too, in Europe. We think about the countries of Europe as being more or less settled, but it wasn't always so. It took the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella to bring together much of what is modern Spain. And when she married the King of France, Eleanor brought much larger and richer landholdings, in Aquitaine and Poitou, to the marriage than did her husband.

Alison Weir's Eleanor of Aquitaine brings to life a remarkable (and remarkably long-lived) woman. She married two kings, and was the mother of three more. She went on Crusade. One of the kings she married was the son of a man she'd likely had an affair with before her marriage, and she was rumored to have been a little too close to her own uncle. Despite having been a desirable wife to the kings of both France and England because of her inheritance, she never really ceded control of those lands to her husbands. She actively encouraged her sons to rebel against and try to overthrow her husband, Henry II of England. This is some soap-opera level stuff.

Weir has quickly become one of my favorite historians to read, because she has a way of synthesizing lots of information into an easily readable and understandable narrative. She's open about when the scholarship is unclear, or there's more than one version of a particular event, and she tells the reader why she has chosen to take a particular position on what likely really happened. She knows that her reader isn't as immersed in the subject as she is and provides context for the events she relates...she finds a good middle ground between assuming her readers know too little or too much.

My only real exposure to Eleanor's story had been the movie version of The Lion In Winter with Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn, which I saw several years ago and remember little of apart from Eleanor being portrayed as a ruthless schemer. Weir never stoops to that kind of caricature of the people involved in Eleanor's life, especially Eleanor herself: she was a political opportunist to be sure, but she also lived in an era that was especially skeptical of women in power and the accounts of her that survive reflect that bias. I've got quite a few of Weir's books on my TBR, and I always look forward to them and recommend them (including this one!) heartily.

Tell me, blog friends...do you have any family history in areas that have had changing borders? We found my great-grandpa's immigration records, and he's actually recorded as being ethnically Polish, but with Austrian nationality, because the area in Poland where we're from was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire!

One year ago, I was reading: Freakonomics

Two years ago, I was reading: All The King's Men (my favorite of that year!)

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Book 105: Eleanor of Aquitaine

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I'd Love To Meet

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is meeting authors. I've actually only ever met one of my favorite authors...Jeffrey Eugenides came to the University of Michigan campus when I was an undergrad to speak, and I came away with a signed copy of my favorite book to show for it. There are, of course, plenty of other authors I'd love to meet, and here are ten of them!

Charlaine Harris: I loved the Southern Vampire Mysteries, and I've heard her other works are just as delightful. She seems so unpretentious and sweet and I'd love the chance to say hi!

Alison Weir: Once I read my first one of her amazing history books, I promptly went out and acquired a copy of pretty much everything else she's ever written. She ran a school for kids with learning disabilities before she was able to be a full-time writer, which I think is pretty awesome.

Stephen King: I think I've only read one of his novels (The Shining for sure, and I can't remember if I read Carrie at some point?), but from his Twitter and the column he used to do (still does? Is it in EW? I can't remember), he seems fantastic. He did actually come to Reno to do a signing last year...but it was my wedding day, so I was kinda busy.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah was completely amazing, and so is her TED talk, and I just love her.

John U Bacon: If I'd planned my schedule better at Michigan, I could have taken one of his classes, but I've read all of his books and I read his blog and he's smart and funny and insightful and loves Ann Arbor and that's a pretty great combo.

Nick Hornby: His protagonists are usually overgrown man-children, which, snore, but he's such a good writer that I eat it up with a spoon anyways. He's so witty with words, I'd love the chance to actually hear him talk.

Kazuo Ishiguro: I love his delicate, sensitive touch with prose and characters and the chance to listen to him talk about how he does it would be amazing.

George R. R. Martin: I love the Song of Ice and Fire series so much (and I've heard incredible things about the Dunk and Egg books, which I want to read soon!) and his blog is always interesting, and he seems like the type to appreciate people nerding out over his work, right?

Tamora Pierce: As much as I love The Hunger Games, I get annoyed when people make it out like Katniss was the first badass female protagonist in YA. Those of us who grew up with Alanna the Lioness and Daine and her wild magic know better. She's the kind of author whose books I want to share with my own children.

J.K. Rowling: She's a brilliant writer and such a bold social media presence. Getting the chance to tell her how much Harry Potter meant to me in person? I'd consider myself very lucky indeed. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I'd Love To Meet

Book 67: The Six Wives of Henry VIII

"Thus we will see that Katherine of Aragon was a staunch but misguided woman of principle; Anne Boleyn an ambitious adventuress with a penchant for vengeance; Jane Seymour a strong-minded matriarch in the making; Anne of Cleves a good-humored woman who jumped at the chance of independence; Katherine Howard an empty-headed wanton; and Katherine Parr a godly matron who was nevertheless all too human when it came to a handsome rogue."

Dates read: July 2-July 7, 2016

Rating: 7/10

When we were growing up, it was always my little sister who was the Anglophile. Every time we stopped at a bookstore, she had to get a book about England. She even ended up married to a British guy (completely coincidentally, but I'm sure that adorable accent didn't hinder his entry into her good graces). But it must be airborne, because she got me hooked into books about England too. I've written before about my fondness for the Tudor period, but while that might have been the first instance of it showing up on this blog, it certainly won't be the last.

Even with being a Tudor nerd, when I pulled Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII off my shelf to read, I figured I was in for a long haul. Nearly 600 pages of nonfiction tends to be a lot to handle, no matter how interesting you find the subject. But as you can see, I actually read it pretty quickly! Which is attributable in large part to how good Weir's writing is. Although she's presenting facts, she doesn't forget that her job as a writer is to tell a story for the reader. The story of Henry the Eighth and his wives is an inherently juicy one, and she tells it well.

Like many stories about Henry and his wives, the first two (Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn) dominate the narrative. In the case of books based solidly in historical fact, I have to imagine that part of that is simply because there's the most information there about these two women. As royalty in her own right, Katherine's life would have been much more documented than a common woman. And since Henry and Anne's affair lasted seven years before their marriage, there was a lot of time for things to be written about her by the types of people whose correspondence would have been preserved. Jane Seymour, on the other hand, had a very short courtship with Henry, and indeed a rather short life once they married, leaving much less time for a record to be developed. Weir does challenge the prevailing wisdom that regards Jane as a mild-mannered pawn used by her relatives to secure influence. She would have had to have a healthy level of her own ambition to pull it off and there's no reason to believe she didn't.

At the end of the day, this is a history, so if you're looking for deeper cultural analysis along the lines of The Creation of Anne Boleyn, you're barking up the wrong tree. It's obviously very thoroughly researched and told with considerable narrative skill, but there's little in the way of "new" information if you're fairly well-versed in the subject. I did learn new things, like that Henry's outreach to the Duchy of Cleves indicated interest in either of the two duchesses...Anne, who became his wife for a short while, or her sister Amelia. I also learned more about the lives of Henry's sisters...not a lot, because they weren't the subject of the book, but enough to intrigue me and make me want to learn more someday. I'd recommend this book to a pretty wide group...people interested in the time/place/people will get the most out of it, but its size shouldn't intimidate readers without that kind of pre-existing grounding in the subject.

Tell me, blog friends...what interests have you picked up from family and friends?

One year ago, I was reading: American Gods

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Book 67: The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Top Ten Tuesday: New-To-Me Authors I Read For The First Time In 2016

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: authors I read for the first time in 2016. I try to read a wide variety of books and so I've read a lot of different authors over the years. But each year brings new ones, and so here are ten authors that I'd never read before.

Malcolm Gladwell: On recommendation from my husband, I started listening to his podcast, Revisionist History earlier this year and really enjoyed it. And then I read David and Goliath, and it offered the same kind of interesting perspectives on conventional wisdom. I'll definitely be looking to read more of his stuff in the future!

Dave Eggers: I know a lot of people love him, but I'd never read him before. I'd been intrigued by The Circle when I read a description of it, so I picked up a secondhand copy and got to it. And while I found the ideas behind it interesting, I actually thought the writing was pretty bad. I've got a copy of another of his works already, so I'll read it, but unless I like it a lot more I'm not going to keep reading him.

Ann Patchett: I'd heard praise for several of her books, but Bel Canto is what I found in a local secondhand shop, so that's what I read. And it was really good: she creates well-rounded characters who relate to each others in interesting ways. But this book fell flat for me at the very very end. I enjoyed the reading of 99% of it so much that I'll definitely be looking to read more of them in the future.

Pat Conroy: Conroy writes a lot of books with a military theme, which doesn't tend to be my wheelhouse. But Lords of Discipline was a Kindle sale book that I bought on a whim, and I was happy that I did. Conroy's writing is powerful, and I found myself deeply invested in the story about a cadet at a military college simply through how well he told the story. I'll definitely be reading more of him!

Helen Oyeyemi: I'd heard wonderful things about Boy, Snow, Bird, and that one is on my shelf to read, but my book club's first read was her collection of short stories What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. I found it to be a more intellectually stimulating than necessarily enjoyable experience, but I did come away wanting to read her novel-length work!

Alison Weir: I'm finding myself drawn more and more to non-fiction as I get older, and there's no subject I enjoy more than royalty. The Six Wives of Henry VIII has an intimidating length, but Weir writes their stories with such clean, readable prose that it all but flew along. She's definitely among my favorite historians!

Don DeLillo: He's an incredibly renowned author that I'd just never come across before. But then I got an ARC of Zero K and while he's got magnificent command of language and the ability to create a strong sense of mood, I just didn't get it. I'm still interested in reading White Noise, because I've heard it's his best, but it's always good to remember that just because "everyone" likes an author doesn't mean you have to.

Erik Larson: Devil In The White City has a great reputation, and I read that one too, but I actually started with Dead Wake, in which he tells the story of the sinking of the Lusitania. Of the two, I actually prefer Dead Wake, but both are well-researched narrative non-fiction stories well worth the read!

Lionel Shriver: I remember seeing the trailer for the movie version of We Need To Talk About Kevin and being interested in maybe seeing it someday (I haven't yet). And then I came across a secondhand copy of it and figured I might as well read it. It's incredible, and I've got a couple other of her books on my TBR now that I know what a great writer Shriver is.

Jhumpa Lahiri: I've actually had a copy of The Namesake on my shelves for YEARS...it's a little torn up in one of the corners because one of my mom's dogs tried to eat it at one point. But it wasn't until this year that I actually sat down and read it and I just loved it. I'm far from the only one raving about Lahiri, but she's worth it, y'all!

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Top Ten Tuesday: New-To-Me Authors I Read For The First Time In 2016