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 My reading this Sunday has been all academic. I’ve been reading articles about bastard feudalism and two books under the same theme. My presentation on this topic is finally ready to be presented and I can put them away. On my trip to the uni library, I also discovered that my request for Anne Neville by Michael Hicks had come in. I have to say, on a brief glimpse I’m absolutely dismayed by this work. Michael Hicks is my favorite historian and I’ve frequently been very pleased by his even-handed treatment of Richard III and the many magnates that surrounded him. I find he agrees with me on many respects, at least from what I remember of reading most of his publications in 2007-2008.
So, here he is writing a biography of Anne Neville. I have a number of problems with it and I’ve only just skimmed a bit of it. Firstly, biographies of women in the middle ages are difficult business. They’re inevitably about their husbands, fathers, and sons, because that’s who we know most about. This woman has a controversial father and husband, but Hicks has done biographies on them before, so we can assume he knows his stuff. At least, my past reading has suggested that this is so.
Here, though, I’m a bit perplexed by several things, mainly relating to a suggested divorce:
- He had her crowned with him. Who on earth would do this if planning divorce eventually? This woman is queen of England now! She might not have power, but that is a political statement. Notice Henry Tudor didn’t crown his wife, Elizabeth of York, for some time, possibly as a “just in case”.
- He suggests that Richard may have wanted to divorce or poison Anne, but on the same page we learn that they were still sleeping together (he later argues that Richard spurned her bed – what?? Make up your mind! Or was he finally listening to the doctors who ordered him to do so?) and that she was ill before this, possibly at their coronation. He obviously wanted an heir, but their son had just died and as the chroniclers say, they were both grieving and she was ill! There were rumors that he poisoned her at the time, but Hicks dismisses these (and rightfully so). No English king had set aside his wife in recent history and I think it’s horribly anachronistic to say Richard was thinking to do so. He must have realistically considered that she might die and he might marry again, but poison is pushing it. The chronicles say he was thinking of divorce, but again, he never did anything to make this happen. Perhaps she died too fast, or perhaps he didn’t think of it at all. Rumors were flying and some of them did make it into chronicles.
- Hicks then uses all of this to argue that Anne Neville was convinced when she died that her whole life had been an incestuous lie. If so, she probably chose it, because according to Hicks, everyone knew this was incest and they both knew their dispensation wasn’t quite good enough. Secondly, if this is as outrageous as he suggests, why on earth don’t we have the protests the suggested marriage to Elizabeth of York caused? Maybe this suggestion of incest would have made Anne unhappy, but it’s her own fault and she had to have known it the whole time.
- Maybe Richard did want to marry his niece, but he did not do so. Even if the letter cited showing Elizabeth’s enthusiasm did exist, there was no marriage and he denied the plan. You seriously can’t call a guy a “serial incestor” if he never actually committed incest. (I don’t think two brothers marrying two sisters is incestuous and even in a contemporary context, his first marriage was accepted). That is unnecessarily harsh language, especially for something that did not happen. Hicks also argues that opposition wouldn’t have stopped Richard, but obviously it did as no marriage took place.
- He then takes issue with her lack of a will. It was not unusual for high-born women to have wills, but Anne was perhaps a special circumstance. One, Hicks takes great care to explain that Anne had pretty much nothing. Richard could have retained all of her inheritance even under a divorce. So first we have to wonder what she’d be leaving to someone. Secondly, who would she leave things to? Her niece and nephew, perhaps, but her nephew was again under control of her husband and I’m not sure where her niece was, probably the same. She didn’t need to give them anything if she didn’t have anything and they were under her husband’s protection. It seems a bit pointless, particularly given how sick she was and her age. Most people gave things to their children and asked for alms to be given to the poor. I don’t think it’s exceptional that she doesn’t have a will if she had no need for one, and we can also note that it may have been lost. As Hicks himself states, we don’t even have the records for Anne that we do for some of her contemporary women, but he suspiciously leaves this idea out here.
I don’t know. He uses facts, but he twists them, and I hate when they do this. The whole biography feels very anachronistic. He refers to Anne as “past her sell-by date” when she was only 28 years old. He then refers to her as a housewife and assures us that she had a full life with lots of sex. I’m left wondering what happened to the historian who even-handedly assessed Richard’s ambition in light of his good lordship and attempted to reconcile the Ricardian Richard and the detractors’ Richard. He painted a compelling picture of necessity there and I think got the closest to a real fifteenth-century person I’ve ever seen. And now he calls Richard’s queen a housewife who “shacked up” with then-Duke Richard and argues that the fact that nearly all of her close relatives died during her lifetime probably didn’t affect her because that was normal at the time. Her father, son, sister, first husband, grandfather, and brothers-in-law all died in her lifetime and some violently. Are we to assume fifteenth-century people didn’t feel grief even when we have evidence that Anne grieved for her son? After he chides historians for forgetting that love matches occasionally existed earlier? I’m so perplexed by this biography. Am I crazy? This review on LT shares some of my confusion at least.
Okay, that’s my rant over. Apologies for hijacking my own blog! Someday soon I will give this book a proper read and review. For now, I think it’s time for some pleasure reading. I’ll be starting with The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende for the Book Club Girl radio show on Wednesday. I’m excited about it! Here is the link if you’re interested.
Sorry if this was a boring Sunday Salon for you, I’ll do my best to return to normal bookish programming soon. I’m sure I’m driving my subscribers away in droves. 
 I recently got new bookshelves for my room, and I’m just loving them. Spent the afternoon putting up my books and sharing it on my blog . One of my friends asked a question and I thought it would be a great BTT question. So from Tina & myself, we’d like to know “How do you arrange your books on your shelves? Is it by author, by genre, or you just put it where it falls on?”
I used to have a system when I had enough space for all the books I owned. I have two bookshelves in my room at my parents’ house. One is my mass market paperbacks, which are shelved two books high in some shelves and always two books deep, if that makes sense. The other one is meant for trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Needless to say, they are both crammed with books. My preferred system is alphabetizing by author and within that, publication date. I used to be very organized about this, but I have too many books now and there’s no way I’m moving them all around just to get a book in its proper place, so everything is a bit haphazard.
When I finally live in my own house and have a full-time job, I plan on having many more bookcases. I’ve decided to try shelving by genre, or at least keep separate the few genres I really like, and alphabetize within that. It will be a long time before my collection is all together and before I have enough money to actually house them all nicely, but when that happens I’m glad I already know exactly how it will be done!
 Today’s question: How do you get your books for reviewing? Do you track them somehow (excel, database, etc), or just put them in a tbr (To Be Read for anyone that doesn’t know) pile?
I get books from all over. I request from publishers, mainly through Shelf Awareness, and sometimes authors if a book sounds really, really good. I have received a fair number from LT Early Reviewers and just won a book the other day from Member Giveaway. I have several contacts who reliably offer me books I’ll like. Most of my ARCs now come from contacts and the odd lone offer. I also buy books, both new and used, and I even get books out from the library if I’m not sure I’ll like them but still want to give them a shot, or if they’re romance novels because I’m 99.9% sure I’m not going to reread them.
When I get a book, I stick its release date or blog tour date on my google calendar, and then I make sure I read it by then. Easy enough. I thought about tagging them in LT, but that seems purposeless when I can just glance at my calendar to see when I need to review everything. An Excel spreadsheet would probably be a good idea, but since I go to google calendar all the time anyway, it’s the easiest. I also keep the books in their own pile and try to read them in chronological order. If I’m ahead, like I am now, I then know I can read other books for fun, or I can try to get further ahead because I have essays coming up!
 I have not been feeling particularly well today and I had a distraction with me, so all I’ve managed so far is a slow walk around town and the purchase of a single book, The Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower. We stayed in for Valentine’s Day yesterday and mostly just ate, which may be the source of my current blah-ness. Since my favorite distraction just left, I decided that since I am going to be reading for the rest of the evening, I might as well write about where I’m spending the next few hours!
So, I’m almost halfway through The King’s Rose by Alisa M. Libby. It’s an ARC and I picked it up thinking that since I’m now scheduling reviews in March, I should start reading the ARCs that have to be reviewed then and lessen the pressure when essay season starts up again (well, actually, I’ll be starting research this week, so the more I read now the better). I didn’t realize that this one doesn’t need to be posted until the 19th though, so it will be a good long while before the review actually shows up. I’m enjoying it though. It’s YA historical fiction about Catherine Howard, so while I like it, my insides are cringing anticipating the ending. I can’t imagine what it would be like reading a book about Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard (or Lady Jane Grey, for that matter) and not know the ending. I think I’d be absolutely devastated because it’s often very easy to become attached to them. At least this way I can mentally prepare myself as the novel moves on. I just realized that this may be a spoiler, so I hope everyone reading knows at least that bit of Tudor history. *crosses fingers* 
Just yesterday I finished Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn and let me tell you, I adored it from beginning to end. That’s a review I can’t wait to write and I’m busy being overjoyed and impatiently waiting for Silent in the Sanctuary to come in the mail so I can get to it. I already have an ARC of Silent on the Moor. I can’t wait for Lady Julia Grey to come visit my beloved Yorkshire and I’m very pleased with my new author discovery.
Next up will be The Brightest Moon of the Century by Christopher Meeks. I’ve been excited about this book since it arrived in the mail last month. I loved Meeks’ two short story collections and this is his first novel, so I suspect my eagerness is justified.
So, great stuff for me ahead this week! What’s next on your reading list?
Beth at Beth Fish Reads tagged me for this meme: Find your 5th photo file folder, then the 5th photo in that file folder. Then pass the meme to 5 people.
Well, I had two subfolders to go through, so I went with the fifth folder under Pictures, then the fifth folder, and then another fifth folder and the fifth picture in there. I have a lot of pictures. I came up with this:
This is one of the towers on Warwick Castle from my very first trip to England in 2005. I thought Warwick Castle was gorgeous and very exciting; I had barely gotten into medieval history back then and all I knew was that I liked castles. I’d like to go back, especially considering all the bits of history I know involving it now. I’m sure the whole display on Warwick the Kingmaker would have a vastly different impact on me now.
Here’s another picture so you can see what I mean about the gorgeous aspect:
And now to tag! I have no idea who’s been tagged for this meme, so I’ll just pick at random from recent commenters: Ruth, Barbara, Jen, Memory, and Wisteria. Have fun!
Do you read any author’s blogs? If so, are you looking for information on their next project? On the author personally? Something else?
This is a funny question for today because I just discovered a new one! Susan Higginbotham commented on my post yesterday and I didn’t realize she had a blog, much less one where she talks about history, and she even has another one on Richard III. You don’t want to know how quickly I added that to my google reader and how I’m a little ashamed I didn’t find it before!
I love author blogs. Getting that little peephole into the brain of my favorite author is fantastic. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but I think I like it best when they discuss things other than books, like other interests, daily activities, whatever. I was thrilled when Sharon Kay Penman started a blog. Even though it probably takes time away from her exciting new book, it’s very exciting to hear about the life of one of my favorite authors and her thoughts on what she is doing outside the fictional world. Her latest post was just yesterday. These are the authors I support by buying their works in hardcover (unless I am offered an ARC, and sometimes even then) because I feel if they make the extra effort, I should too. I’m sure it’s also because I think of them as celebrities in some sense and it’s so exciting to discover that authors are people who yes, can write extraordinarily well, but who are mostly just people that somehow are okay with talking to little insignificant me.
I also read Brandon Sanderson’s blog, George R.R. Martin’s blog, Michelle Moran’s blog, John Scalzi’s blog, and Neil Gaiman’s blog (I think everyone reads that though). Probably some others too. Nan Hawthorne’s blog and Patrick Rothfuss’s blog. James Dashner’s blog. Jaci Burton’s blog. Oh, and can’t forget Lynn Flewelling’s blog. And now I’m going to stop looking through my google reader because I have stuff to do today, but I think there are still more. I may add them later. I’ll probably discover more as I go through everyone else’s posts anyway!
This meme has been going around for a good week or so now. I asked Alea at Pop Culture Junkie to interview me. Here are the questions she asked:
1. Are the books always better than the movie adaptations?
In my experience, yes. I love some movies based on books, like Pride and Prejudice (you all know the one!) or Gone with the Wind, but I enjoy reading books more, so I’ll probably always like the books better. In general I sometimes struggle to compare them because they cut so much out. Those two are probably my favorites because they are so long and the storylines are very similar to the books. Well, for P&P at least.
2. What is the most you ever paid for a book?
I don’t think I’ve ever paid too much for books. I have some nice editions, but usually they were gifts. Overall, I’m pretty cheap. I don’t think I’ve ever paid more than $20, usually on Amazon for hardcover copies to support my favorite authors.
3. What is one book you love that has next to no words in it?
I’m not sure I own any books with next to no words in them! Wait, I can think of two. I have a coffee table book of Chanel gowns which is very lovely, but I also have a National Geographic book of famous photographs. That one is stunning and while it has explanations, the photos can speak for themselves.
4. Who is your favorite author?
This question could almost be easier if it was “who isn’t your favorite author?” because it’s very difficult to pick one. For an author to make my favorites list in general, I must love at least two of their books. I will copy my LT list, which I think is fairly accurate:
Jane Austen, Jacqueline Carey, Bernard Cornwell, Robin Hobb, Kazuo Ishiguro, Guy Gavriel Kay, Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Michelle Moran, Sharon Kay Penman, Brandon Sanderson, Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton
Oh, except I have to add Robin McKinley to the list. You’ll see when my Deerskin review gets published, should be soon.
5. What is your favorite thing about blogging? Least favorite?
I love the community. I’m a lurker at heart and I have a difficult time getting involved with established groups of people. Book bloggers are always kind, friendly, and welcoming. I feel comfortable leaving comments on everyone’s blogs or chatting on Twitter and LT and I do my best to make all feel welcome on mine too and in my conversations. Thank you all for being awesome!
My least favorite part is probably the work I put into it. This is definitely a labor of love, but it can be hard to sit at the computer and tease out words to accurately convey how I feel about certain books. Making the site look nice, going out and finding new blog friends, and sometimes even being taken away from my own TBR pile can be negatives, but I love the sense of accomplishment I feel when I find a new awesome blogger and potential friend, look at my site, or write a review that I think really captures how I felt about a book. It just takes a lot of time and I worry how I’ll maintain it when I no longer have the time that I do now. But I have many worries to get over before that happens, so we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!
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Thanks for the questions, Alea! And now I extend the offer to all of you reading. Do you want me to send you 5 interview questions? Just leave me a comment saying so and I’ll send an email your way.
Today’s question: Do you use a rating system on your blog? How do you feel about using the rating system provided on sites like Library Thing and Amazon? When looking up information on a book you are interested in, do you use the ratings provided by these sites (or similar sites) to help you make the decision on purchasing the book?
This is a very good question for me because I’ve always wondered if I should institute some sort of rating system around here. I’ve seen number ratings, letter ratings, and star ratings around the blogosphere. Something in me, however, has always resisted just giving a book a number or a letter. They are complex and I think almost all of them have bits that are good and bits that are bad. It’s very hard to categorize, especially after I’ve given my review, and sometimes I’m not sure the star rating I’d give a book matches what I’m trying to get across. This is why I don’t use them here.
That said, I do use star ratings on LT. Half the time, it’s a month or more before my review gets over there, and I know that I’m always a bit irritated by people who write reviews and then don’t put a star rating in. Maybe that’s hypocritical of me given my policy here, and given that I never miss it on other blogs if they lack a rating system, but since the mechanism is there, I like to see both, and I like to add my opinion to the little graph on the side so that it is the most accurate possible. I have a system for these. 5-star books are perfect, 4-star books I really liked, 3-star books are okay, 2-star books I disliked, and 1-star books I either didn’t finish or I hated the whole way through.
I hate the star system on Amazon, though. It seems there is something wrong with you there if you use anything less than 4 or 5 stars for a book that perhaps deserves only 3 stars. 3 stars is not bad, in fact, it usually means that the book is fine but it’s not really my cup of tea or didn’t draw me in for some reason. On Amazon, however, it seems that if you like a book, you must give it a 5 star rating. As such, it has lost its meaning. I’ve more or less stopped posting reviews there and only do so for review copies and books that have no reviews but mine.
I’d say I use the star ratings on LT to help me evaluate eventual books to be purchased, but most of my choices are spur-of-the-moment, buying a book I’ve heard of before. Since I don’t read reviews before I read a book myself (or I put sufficient time between the review and the reading to forget what the plot is about), I don’t have many other choices.
This meme has been going around the blog world for a bit, so I decided to jump in when I saw Alyce’s post at At Home With Books. Somewhat unluckily for me, her randomizer gave me ‘Y’. I’m up for a challenge though! I decided to go for it. When I got stuck, my programmer husband-to-be used his crazy skills to give me a list of words that started with ‘y’. It’s like cheating. Except not because, well, Y is a hard letter and I came up with most of them on my own. Anyway, on with the list.
- Yellow – this one was easy! Yellow has been my favorite color for as long as I can remember. I like bright, sunny yellow or pastel yellow, nothing dark or greenish.
- York – Well, I’m currently living here, I’m not sure much else needs to be said! They say this is the best preserved medieval city in England and I love walking through history each and every day.
- Yankees – I’d be a little remiss if I didn’t mention my family’s favorite baseball team. I’m not a fan of baseball myself but if I was I’d be a Yankees fan.
- Yorkists – You know which side I’d be on if I was fighting in the Wars of the Roses. Historians shouldn’t be biased like this, but I’m taking a year off so I’m allowed for now!
- Yoda – I love Star Wars. In recent years I’ve come to realize that the original trilogy consists of my favorite movies of all time; I never get tired of them. I have a quote from Yoda on my bedroom wall at my parents’ house about how size doesn’t matter. I always thought it was relevant as I’m a rather tiny 5 feet and slender on top of that.
- Yarn -I enjoy crocheting and recently I’ve been thinking about taking up knitting as well. Looking at the yarn selection and picking just what I’m going to use to make my next project is one of my favorite parts of crafting.
- Yogurt – A great healthy snack and even better with fruit mixed in.
- Yeast – Okay, this is stretching it, but I love bread and bread products in general and they’re all made with yeast, so I think it works! Also, I bake and am looking forward to the day I can afford a breadmaker.
- Yule – I’m aware this isn’t technically Christmas, but for my purposes it’s close enough! As much as I hate Christmas music and mushy Christmas stories, I do like the season and picking gifts out for people (as long as I can afford them) and I’ll always remember being an excited child on Christmas morning.
- Yeoman warders – I’m getting a little desperate with this last one, but you have to admit the guys and girls at the Tower of London are very cool. I think it would be pretty cool to be one, but I wouldn’t like to stay in the Tower of London overnight. I don’t think I’d fancy meeting headless Anne Boleyn at 2 am, but maybe that’s just me!
Well, there’s my 10. Whew! I’m just glad I didn’t get x. Even my fiance’s super word finding tool doesn’t have much there. I thought about cheating a little and using Yorkshire, given that it’s gorgeous and historic on its own, but I decided to try a little harder than words that just start with “York”.
If you want to play along, leave me a comment and I’ll give you a letter!
While I was away last weekend, Amy at Passages to the Past tagged me for the Six Quirky Things meme. I already did this meme, but I thought of another quirky thing about me that is very appropriate for the fall.
I hate Halloween.
It started when I was little. I was a very timid child, so I hated the scary masks and costumes that the other kids in school wore. In fact, I was terrified of almost everything in costume, even the Kool-Aid Man that used to wander the grocery store where my mom shopped. Parade day each year in elementary school was a horror.
Obviously, I’m no longer afraid of costumes and I don’t have a real reason to hate Halloween. Regardless, I don’t like ghost stories, in fact I don’t like any scary stories or movies, and I hate even more the mischief that always seems to go around in my parents’ neighborhood. All the trees in our and our neighbors’ yards are regularly toilet papered and we’ve seen cars splattered with eggs. Nothing dangerous, just annoying. And I’m possibly the least creative person in the world, so I never come up with good costumes. Free candy is nice, but it’s not enough to redeem the holiday for me. I love fall, but only after Halloween is over.
So I don’t like Halloween, even though all of my friends love it and encourage me to go out with them. Tell me, do you like Halloween? Why?
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