Sharpe!
Sharpe's Escape
My last few days have been all about Richard Sharpe. And that is a good thing. I just love these books! The Napoleonic Wars were never this interesting in history class. Sharpe is a soldier's soldier. He escaped poverty in London by joining the British Army and discovered that it wasn't much better. Bernard Cornwell doesn't glorify the battlefield. The descriptions of what happens when two armies go after each other is not for someone with a weak stomach. It gets pretty grusome. When the troops aren't fighting, there is plenty of drama, intrigue, and a bit of bodice ripping to keep the pages turning. And they are all fairly historically accurate. Cornwell ends each novel with a "historical note" to indicate which parts are true and which parts he may have changed a little. This is the 10th Sharpe's book I've read and I plan to read the next 11 as well.
The first Sharpe's books I read were the prequels that are set in India at the turn of the 19th century. There are three of them and they are all great reads. These three have recently been turned into a BBC production called Sharpe's Challenge. All the Sharpe's productions star Sean Bean and they had to turn the India stories into a sequel to keep him in it. It's good, but I was a little distracted by thinking about which parts came from which book. M liked it and she hadn't read any of the books, so I suppose that's a better recommendation. The "Behind the Scenes" bonus on the disc was interesting because they actually made authentic working replicas of everything. (Guns, canons, uniforms, ... pretty much everything.) Yeah, I like the videos well enough, but they are no comparison to the books.
The trouble with reading a Sharpe's book, is that now I don't want to read anything but Sharpe's. Oh boy.