Magician's Nephew - You Unlock this Door

Well, I'm back after a sort of sabbatical from LT and from other things too. Last year was a hard year.

I'm Jim a retired computer programmer and software architect and guy who had a great career making computers do what i wanted them to do - sometimes.

I'm an armchair historian fascinated by the people and the processes that are sort of an explanation of how we got - as a species, as a people - from there to here.

I love words and reading and speaking and reciting and listening to people read and recite and act words. Writers are magicians. Tell me a story.

The title of this thread is from Rod Serling whose "Twilight Zone" taught me to see the world from other points of view with vision and clarity and wisdom and empathy -- through a glass darkly and under the unearthly light of another moon.

Glad to be back

and i like to end my posts with quotations. Here's one.

You unlock this door with the key of imagination.
Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind.
You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.
-- Rod Serling

and of books

Welcome back, Jim!

This is from a gallery show we saw of an American artist named Ed Ruscha. He liked painting signs he saw traveling around the open American Southwest. This is one of them.

I'll just hang it on the wall over here.

Happy reading in 2024, Jim!

Happy new year, Jim.

I think it's important when starting a new thread to level set - let my readers know what they can expect going forward.

Back in the day there was a Carnegie-built library in Elmhurst, NY, small and a little shabby, and as a kid I more or less lived there. And one day I found on a "to be shelved" page this learned tone.



It's about a stegosaurus named George who (a) is still alive in the American southwest circa 1955 (b) can speak and understand English and (c) is shy and like Mr. Ed, only talks to a very few people.

He meets two spunky kids - I read a lot of books about spunky kids in those days - and has comic mis-adventures and helps to capture some bank robbers and more or less saves the ranch from foreclosure.

It's a sweet little book published by Scholastic and its matter of fact goofiness delighted my ten year old mind. And a copy fell into my hands recently and it delighted me again.

Fun. We're off.

"Credo quia absurdum"
-- Tertullian

Yay for childhood favorites! And I hope 24 is a better year for you.

Good to see you back, Jim. >6 magicians_nephew: Love the nostalgic read, very colourful cover and they look like '50s kids.

Thanks for stopping by, you two.

My Book Club took a look at Balzac and his Eugenie Grandet and the old boy can still get a lively discussion going years after his death.

This is the one, part of his "Human Comedy" series, about the pathologically twisted miser, old Grandet, who has stacks and stacks of gold louis in his locked storeroom but lives like the poor cooper he started out as, forcing his family to dine on scanty rations and live in a squalid slum. He's Scrooge but he's not funny.

But his daughter Eugenie has come of age, and everybody knows she will be the old man's heir, and so the grandees of the country are flocking to seek her hand. Purely a business deal, you understand. All marriages are.

BUT then her young hot cousin from Paris shows up and Eugenie loses her head to this handsome stranger. She will learn.

Balzac brings these people brilliantly to life with all their frailty. Comedy, not so much. Human, definitely.

The ending is a tragedy -- and a sadness. You may not like Eugenie's choices. You may find them the only choices possible.

But lovely, compassionate storytelling. Exciting to revisit it.

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
-- Charles Dickens

My "reading" on Audible (while exercising or taking meds) is Rachel Maddow's new Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism about the rise of fascism in American in the 1930's

Perhaps it's useful to see what the dictionary has to say:

Fascism: a political philosophy that exalts nation and race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

Fascism never really got going in America to be sure but there were demagogues and shadowy figures a'plenty who would have sure as heck liked it to.

Father Coughlin the "Radio Priest" spread "America First" racism and xenophobia on a national scale while Huey Long and his bully boy rhetoric and his armed thugs spread terror in his fiefdom of Louisiana. You may have heard of those two. There are lots of others in here you probably have never heard of.

Maddow is not slow about drawing parallels between then and now (her title, for example) but she's doesn't rub your nose in it. She doesn't have to.

Can it happen here? I still say no. But I've been wrong before.

"History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to perhaps be useful to the modern traveller"
-- Henry Glassie

Hi Jim! Happy New Thread, happy 2024 to you.

>6 magicians_nephew: I am thrilled to see The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek here. I read and loved it as a child, and bought myself a copy sometime before I joined LT in 2007. I’ve also got my original-from-Scholastic The Enormous Egg.

>10 magicians_nephew: I hope you’re right and that the fascist forces trying to rise here do not. I’m not looking at/reading much news these days, I’m afraid.

Thanks Karen for stopping by.

I'm pleased to find so much Shy Stegosaurus love here on LT

>10 magicians_nephew:. I hope you are right about facism here! That sounds like an interesting book.

Do you know who Stephen Sondheim is? Of Course you do.

Finishing The Hat and Look I Made a Hat is a collection in two BIG volumes of Sondheim's Broadway Lyrics (with commentary) going right back to the beginning.

For a fanatic like me who can recite the lyrics from memory, the treat here is Sondheim's little asides, commentary and anecdotes about the creative process and working with (and learning from) the likes of Bernstein,("West Side Story") Julie Styne and Jerry Robbins, ("Gypsy") among others.

It's like being in the back room while the bakers are baking, adding in this ingredient, changing that one, trying this, rejecting that. If all you know is the finished pie it can be eye-opening.

Sondheim also gives us some well observed sketches of writers like Noel Coward, Larry Hart and others who Sondheim admires - or doesn't admire -- and that is a mini course in the history of the Broadway musical that would be quite remarkable all by itself. For good measure, he gives a clinic on do's and don'ts on writing for the theatre. Or just writing.

Lyrics he changed to please Merman or Bernadette Peters or even Richard Rodgers himself. Lyrics he liked and lyrics that can still make him wince, even to this day.

(Would a semi literate Puerto Rican Shop Girl like Maria really sing "I Feel Pretty and Witty and Bright!" Well maybe not.)

It's a big book with sometimes tiny type that had me getting out the magnifying glass.

But it was worth it to hear the voice of a man I deeply admire and understand a little bit of his process and his struggle. "Art isn't Easy" as he says on one of his songs. In some ways he is his own harshest critic. But that's OK because I'm his biggest fan.

Richly rewarding. Loved it.

Bit by bit, putting it together...
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art.
Every moment makes a contribution,
Every little detail plays a part.
Having just the vision's no solution,
Everything depends on execution, Putting it together,
that's what counts.
-- Stephen Joseph Sondheim

Happy New Year, Jim. I like that Sondheim lyric. I’ve become a pretty big fan in my later years. How great that you have those lyric collections. They would be “project books” for me, ones where I read a little bit each day. My current project book is The Iliad - the new Emily Wilson translation.

>13 magicians_nephew: I can relate to that!

Thanks for stopping by, Joe. Good to see you in these parts.

Wow! my little thread was deemed popular enough to attract spammers? I suppose I should feel honored

Alistair Maclean is the King of the Big Bang Bangs - books like The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare and Ice Station Zebra among many others. He likes to blow things up.

In each a wry taciturn hero sets out on a deadly mission and does one incredible feat of derring-do after another, each more "over the top" than the last. They're not cartoon-y like the James Bond movies. They're action adventure -- and the good guys win.

So I thought i would go back and read his first ever novel HMS Ulysses and you know maybe it was a mistake.

It's about a ship during World War II on the convoy run from Halifax to Russia, sailing above the Arctic Circle in merciless cold and wind, the crew's exhausted and bitter, and just for fun there is a German pack of submarines trying to take them out.

And they pile on the misery and the hardship until you want to weep and characters you've come to like start dying in heart-stopping ways. It's hard to read.

He gets the details right, of course. But you know, maybe the more realistic a book like this is, the less you can just hang back and enjoy it.

B Plus as history but C Minus as entertainment, I'm sorry to say.

But every writer takes a while to find his feet, and this writer did too.

"There are no winners in war --- only survivors"
-- Jake Fulton

Welcome back, Jim!

Thanks for stopping by Rachel. Missed you guys.

One of my favorite kind of books are the ones where the author invites you in, sits you down, pours you a drink and then hits you over the head with a large croquet mallet.

Submitted for your approval: Trust a book that starts out in a whisper and then builds gradually into an avalanche.

The first part is a rather proper, well-made story of a man with an understanding of economics but not much else, who sets out with his narrow understanding and builds a financial empire. Along the way he marries, and his wife becomes an important philanthropist, then falls ill and despite the best efforts of everyone, dies.

When I got this far I was ready to put the book aside and go read Hopalong Cassidy

But then we hear the same story -- or is it? -- told from different points of view, with different axes to grind, and learn more, -- or do we? -- about this man and his wife and his life. And her life.

It's an amazing achievement for one writer to write so clearly and richly in so many different voices, and test your sympathies, and make you challenge what you know and what you think you know. If you have enough money, you can tell the story the way YOU want to tell it. Or maybe not.

Not an easy milkshake to get a straw into but in the end, I think well worth the effort. I loved it. (Bong!)

“The first person is the most difficult form because the writer is locked inside the head of the narrator and can’t get out. He can’t say “meanwhile, back at the ranch” as a transition because he is imprisoned inside the narrator. But so is the reader! The reader does not see that the governess is the villainess because what the governess sees is all the reader ever sees.”
― Robert M. Persig

>22 magicians_nephew: - Trust has been on and off my mental TBR ever since it came out. Your comments have put it back on.

Just to take a minute to celebrate Melanie (Safka) who died this week at age 76.



She sang at Woodstock with just her guitar and wowed the place. (Her song about Woodstock was called "Lay Down(Candle in the Rain)".
She sang fierce powerful songs like "Beautiful People".
She sang witty sexy songs like "Brand New Key".

Even in retirement she wrote and sang and her voice was always clear and sweet and so uniquely her. A woman of peace and a woman of grace. Saw her a few times in person at Folk City and other places. Have her albums. Gonna miss her.

She sounds like a wonderful musician.

>24 magicians_nephew: I love the song Brand New Key. She will be remembered.

Hi Jim!! I found you!! Hoping this year is a much better year. And I love The Shy Stegosaurus up top. : )

>6 magicians_nephew: I immediately went to my library and requested “The Shy Stegosaurus”! And there’s a The Shy Stegosaurus of Indian Springs, published seven years later. Both will be coming my way. Thanks!

Karen O

>24 magicians_nephew: I will always remember her for 'Alexander Beetle'.

>27 Berly: KIM! Great to see you here!

>28 klobrien2: Yes the second Shy Stegosaurus is same Stegosaurus but different kids - or kid. But it's still a good one - hope you enjoy it.

>29 FAMeulstee: Thanks for stopping by, Anita!



My college girlfriend gave me a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit when we graduated.

I still have it. Thanks to all my friends who helped me to become Real.

Just a word about The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store which everybody seems to have their noses in this month.

It's a big book about the doings of the Jewish and Black communities in the small town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in the 1930's and years after.

It's mostly the tale of Miss Chona, a Jewish woman with a handicap and a big heart, and later Dodo, a young Black Man with a handicap and a big heart, and how they go through life and help each other and are helped by the different complex relationships and rough-hewn bargains among the downtrodden and much sinned against Blacks and Jews.

The author has stories to tell about the people of both communities and some of them are good as anything you will read today. Stories about music and money, and food, and sharing, and murder and betrayal, and gossip over the back fence and secrets only reluctantly told.

But there's an awful lot of them, and it's easy to lose the mainline of the book, which even the author seems to do a few times. When everybody is talking at the same time, it's hard to hear anybody clearly.

And the ending, which is mostly the tale of Dodo, is both horrific and sort of not to be believed - a fairy tale ending. Happily ever after. The End. Is it going to be THAT kind of a book?

Liked a lot of the parts but not the sum of the whole. McBride knows whereof he speaks, and his memoir The Color of Water also casts a net profitably in these waters.
Maybe you're better off reading that.

“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
-- Tim O'Brian

Poor Things is out as a movie now and I thought i would give it another look (I had read it years ago).

It's a strange wondrous book, an author's labor of love and more than a little over the top.

It purports to be a memoir of a medical student who met a unworldly unsociable doctor -- ok -- and tucked into the memoir is the wild and woolly story of a woman named Bella who (may have) been sewn together a la Frankenstein to have an adult woman's body and the tabla rasa mind of a child. So she sets out and we experience the modern world (of the 1880's?) through her eyes. Sort of a female "Candide", with money and agency two rare qualities of a woman in that century.

So she has comic adventures and has sex (a lot!) and travels the world with her sort of gigolo husband, and then returns to Glasgow for more alarms and revelations.

It's a fun book and I enjoyed a lot of it. The problem is that most of the characters are just garish painted dolls out of a Punch and Judy show, and it's hard to care about them and their doings very much. And the satire is sort of sat-tired - not the cool scalpel of Bernard Shaw but more the pig's bladder of Bozo the Clown. And maybe you won't be as gobsmacked about the unfairness of the cruel cold world as the author would like you to be.

The book was written in the 1980's believe it or not though it works hard to present like a Victorian epistolary novel with letters and diary entries like Dracula or some of Jules Verne. There are woodblock illustrations. OK.

I enjoyed it for what it was. But after all the noise and to do, there may be less here than meets the eye.

Looking forward to the movie.

And the moral of that is?. . .
-- Lewis Carroll

>19 magicians_nephew: Ha Jim, I thought the same thing when there were spammers on my thread.

Thanks for the review of Trust, I have the book but haven't read it - like too many others taking up space in my home. I picked it up because of an LT review but I'm not clear about why at this point. Thanks for making my acquisition more understandable.

>33 Familyhistorian: Trust is a good 'um, Meg. I'm looking forward to hearing what you (and Katie) make of it.



Taking notice that unreliable narrators don't just turn up in fiction - sometimes you find them on every street corner.

Denis Johnson's little book Train Dreams really sneaks up on you. The language is spare and hard like a hard wood railroad tie, the writing is back woods poetry chanted to the sound of a far away whistle, casual and off hand but also precise and just-the-right-word-my-God in ways that just snatches the breath out of you.

It's the story of a man ageless, fatherless, almost nameless growing up in the Pacific Northwest, working as a laborer on some big engineering projects and living his life at home with and sometimes at odds the world and nature around him. Life and death are his nearest neighbors.

There are great hardships and small joys and we see a man who has learned to take what life gives him, without complaining, with acceptance. We learn about him as much by what he doesn't say as by what he does. Lovely well drawn characters pop up and disappear as quickly as telegraph poles flash by outside the boxcar doors.

The ending is a mystery - or a mysticism. You're either gonna like it or hate it. Trains take us from here to there and back again. Maybe that's all there is.

Now a traveler under the gray-black winter sky
I've come to find a gathering of eagles.
Not for the sake of mingling with the great birds.
But only to justify a thousand streets walked end to end.
Ten thousand evenings spent listening to the small sounds of the night
in station after station.
-- Rod McKuen

>35 magicians_nephew: Terrific review of Train Dreams”! I read the book a few years ago and gave it 5 stars, so I guess I liked it a lot! 8>) Might be time for a reread. Thanks!

Karen O

>34 magicians_nephew: I sometimes take a while to pick up on unreliable narrators since I approach a book with the assumption that the narrator is reliable. It takes a pretty obviously unreliable narrator for me to notice, I ashamedly admit.

>34 magicians_nephew: Good one!! LOL.

>37 The_Hibernator: I am with you on not quickly recognizing unreliable narrators. Also, I don't run across them very often, so I am not immediately suspicious in general. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it! ; )

>35 magicians_nephew: Agreed Jim, that one is much weightier than the sum of its words which are few!

Thanks for stopping by Paul. It's good to see you.

There are books and there are bagatelles. Muriel Spark has written some really amazing books, including my two favorites The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and it's sort-of-sequel Girls of Slender Means.

But one fine day she sat down and wrote Not to Disturb which is barely a hundred pages and is about half witty fun and half pain in the ass cynicism.

We start out in media res in a chateau in Switzerland. The Baron and the Baroness are closeted in the library (with orders NOT TO DISTURB) and the butler and (very pregnant) housemaid and other spear carriers are huddled in the servants hall, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So it's like a murder mystery right out of Dame Agatha (or a mad game of "Clue") but with characters that even when they are totally annoying, are fun to watch and hang out with.

Or it's 'Waiting for Godot" where Godot will be the police coming to sweep up the mess the next morning. And there will be a mess in the morning.

Probably a book, dare i say it, that was more fun to write than it was to read. But even as you snort or gasp or try to catch the plot fading into the ether, you know you're in good hands with Spark. The lady can write. But you knew that.

Now I think perhaps we are ready to begin?
-- Philip Roth

Hi Jim! Hope this finds you well and happy.

>21 magicians_nephew: Excellent quote. I have and have read Enough Rope and a contemporary fiction I gave 4* to, Farewell, Dorothy Parker. And, unread, her complete essays and a biography Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This?.

>22 magicians_nephew: I’ve been reading dual-POV novels frequently for the last year or so and most of them are successful at keeping the voice of each clear and not compromised. These are not great literature, mind, but I’ll take the good parts of a book where I can find them.

>24 magicians_nephew: Brand New Key lyrics immediately came into my head, almost complete, definitely in her voice.

>31 magicians_nephew: My copy of The Velveteen Rabbit, from the 1970s, is still on my shelves, read many, many times.

Thank for stopping by, Karen.

Don't mean to make this this obituary column around here but i have to tell you about Ramona Fradon who died this week at the age of 97.



Ramona was a comic book artist at a time when there were just not very many women comic book artists. And she she was so freaking GOOD that male artists admired her work and went out of their way to work with her on her projects. She was the master of composition and framing and detail and other things. She drew women who looked like women, not soft core male fantasy.

I have a daily Brenda Starr strip she drew and autographed for me years ago. But I'd rather show you a little panel she drew last year as a commission.



The Art of Ramona Fradon is a good place to start getting to know this remarkable artist.

And she was a great laugher, too

Thanks Ramona.

Hi Jim!! Hope your week is going well. I am not familiar with Ramona, but I like the cartoon you posted. Sorry she is gone.

Hi Jim!

Ramona Fradon sounds like an interesting cartoonist, Jim. I'm not sure if I've seen anything that she has drawn besides the image on your thread.

If your newspaper ran comic strips you undoubtedly saw her work on "Brenda Starr" and others.

She is mostly know for work on the "Aquaman" backup stories for DC and creating the minor character "Metamorpho"

Masters of the Air is running on one of the streaming services and it took me back to the fine book that came out a few years ago.

It's a fascinating story of the American airmen who flew bombing raids against Nazi Germany during World War II.

The British liked to run night bombing raids, which missed the targets A LOT, but had the advantage that the bombing crews came home, more often than not.

The Americans favored daylight raids, which they thought would have a better chance of you know, actually hitting the target. But the loss of life was horrible. and the missions, fiercely harassed by German fighters, really not much more effective than the British ones.

If you ever read Catch-22 you may get some of the flavor of this. You had to fly 25 missions before you could be sent home. One in five missions didn't come back. You do the math.

There are stories of incredible bravery and ingenuity here, in some most unlikely men , but mostly they hammer the bottom line: These missions cost many many lives, and accomplished very very little. Only late in the war, when the flower of the Luftwaffe was sent to fight in Russia, did the bombers have a chance of being effective.

The home front was told their boys were winning the war. By and large it wasn't true. They say Truth is the first casualty of war. The airmen of the "Bloody 100th" knew who the casualties were - knew them by name. We should know them too.

Just a footnote: Targeting and killing civilians was seen as acceptable even strategic in this campaign. Civilians worked in the factories that made the guns that kept the war going. Bombing civilians was seen then as now as a way to shorten the war. Sometimes history ain't pretty.

Recommended.

War is all Hell and you cannot change it.
-- William Tecumseh Sherman

.

This statue can be found at the University of Maryland, Jim Henson's alma mater.

This is how I always picture Jim and Kermit the frog talking things over together

Wanted to say a few words about Fates and Furies a new novel that our book group took a look at last month.

It's the story of Lotto (AKA Lancelot, if you're playing at home) who starts out a goofy sort of charming rich kid and marries a girl he meets in college after only knowing her a few days.

His mother cuts him off, for reasons that don't make a whole lot of sense, and he drifts for a while as a not-very-good actor until he finds out he can write plays and make money writing them. His wife supports him through thin and thick, and is otherwise kind of a background character we don't get to know much about. That's the Fates part. OK.

Then in the second half of the book we hear from the wife, who has her own back story of guilt and abuse and neglect, and a ton of resentment over the role she has chosen to play (was forced to play?) for so many years. Her vengeance is epic in scope and "Fury".

But I dunno. If these two people just, you know, talked to each other, much of the book would just not have to happen.

And just too many times when the author kicks the television and adds a plot twist just for the hell of it. And the ending was all fire, flood and devastation and maybe just a leetle bit over the top.

A book that you read and shake your head and then put aside. That ain't good.

Your mileage may vary.

The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars
but in ourselves, that we are underlings
-- Shakespeare

Having a good time listening to (as opposed to reading) an old favorite of mine, Gore Vidal's Burr.

It's a mischievous well researched book that take a look back (from supposed memoirs of the infamous "Traitor" Aaron Burr) to the early days of our American Republic.

Vidal (with Burr as his mouthpiece) has a lot of interesting things to say about the founders and the framers, some of whom were much more human and fallible than the grey marble busts that adorn our schoolrooms.

Burr talks knowingly about Washington's many military disasters and admires his canny "political" skill to have his name seen as the victor in many conflicts where Lee or Greene might rightly have claimed the laurels. And Jefferson's "inventions" some of which were seen as pretty goofy even in those days.

And for those who think our fair land is now hopelessly gridlocked by factions and tribalism, and violence and scandal, well my dear ones, guess what - it was always that way.

Note that no one in those days had the least problem calling an ex-VICE President to account in a criminal trial. No immunity. Trumpsters take note.

It's just that real history isn't always how they teach it at the Little Red Schoolhouse - or at Harvard. But Vidal is careful of his facts - and they're worth listening to.

Makes you wonder what would have happened if Lin-Manual Miranda had picked up a copy of this book, instead of Ron Chernow's Hamilton when he was casting around for a subject for a new play.

If you read this one go right on and read Vidal's Lincoln which is almost as good. Witty and fascinating and highly recommended.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
And the fear that it might be true
-- Gore Vidal

If you're going to sit down and read a history book, sometimes it's useful to read two at once - just to get the "on the other hand" point of view.

So while I was chucking my way though Burr I also was enjoying Stacy Schiff's Samuel Adams which i picked up last year when the author was in town on book tour.

Sam Adams was an eloquent and important voice in the movement for independence in America, but sometimes historians tend to downplay his role. One of the reasons was lack of material: Sam ordered his family to burn his papers on his death.

But we have a lot of what other people - his cousin John for example - said about him, and we have his published writings, which made independence from the Crown palatable, even welcome, among his New England neighbors still yearning for some kind of accommodation with the Empire, and its enough to make a sounding.

Sam saw clearly that independence was the way to go, and his writings and his actions all moved in that direction. (He was a major player in the "Boston Tea Party" demonstration).

Jefferson reading Adams in Virginia thought his voice was the strongest and clearest in the cause of liberty. High praise.

FWIW, I can find no evidence that Samuel Adams ever brewed beer in any quantity, or that Samuel Adams ever met Aaron Burr. (Though Burr certainly knew Adams' writing)

After the war he went back to Massachusetts and was elected governor and largely faded from the national stage.

Schiff is not an eloquent writer, but she has done her research, and she tells the Adams story warmly, with lots of lovely side glances at revolutionary America. I learned a lot.

Recommended.

It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.
-- Samuel Adams

Found this on Facebook - my childhood revolved around my local library

Taking a break from American History I picked up a copy of The Wars of the Roses by Dan Jones.

This is the history that every British schoolboy is forced to plod through, and generally learns to loathe.

If you teach the people qua people this is a fascinating period of English History, but if you just do the battles and the beheadings this can be a bit of a slog.

Jones' book is alas much more the latter than the former. and it's hard sledding. Keeping track of the Nevilles and the Stanleys and who is up and who is down isn't much fun. Will probably put it aside DNF and pick up Alison Weirs much better telling instead.

History is the bunk
-- Henry Ford

>53 magicians_nephew: I got more out of Dan Jone's The Wars of the Roses than you did but then I've always had an interest in these conflicts and wanted to get a better idea of the play book.

>46 magicians_nephew: Newspapers here did run comic strips but never "Brenda Starr". She's a new old character to me.

I prefer social histories to battle histories, too. Battles bore me.

I am not a big fan of history books, but my RL Bookclub is reading The Wolves at the Door, the story of a highly successful female spy in WW2 and I am actually enjoying it!