What I'm reading

[coughingbear]

Recently finished:

Blood of Dragons, Robin Hobb - last of the Rain Wild Chronicles. Enjoyable; not as wrenching or impressive a series or conclusion as there is to the Tawny Man or the Liveship books, but reasonably satisfying.

Comments

[anonymous]

[coughingbear]

You're quite right. I've screened them. Will work out if I can retitle the thread or something, though, because of course chat about Howatch was something I hoped for!

[coughingbear]

I know - and that perhaps there's a missing Starbridge novel, where the Archbishop ends up at the Fordites baring his soul.

He clearly was very strongly attached to Ann Todd (who turns out to have been quite famous - Wiki entry here). Oddly, I was recommending the Derek Tangye books to debodacious the other day, and thinking I'd like to re-read them myself, and Ann Todd's second husband turns out to have been Nigel Tangye, Derek's brother. Will have to see if she is mentioned in any of the Minack books.

[coughingbear]

I think that's very true, and not just in recovery. Not least because other people's problems are so much more fun to fix.

Another thing she's very good at is the way you can be both in little tiny pieces and maintaining a facade and even doing some useful work (like Neville).

[callmemadam]

Interesting about Cosmo Lang. I suppose they based the recent TV film on this book? It was very unfavourable to Lang, claiming that he engineered the abdication.

Years ago, I was watching a programme either about or mentioning Lang, when I was amazed to see a priest (Anglican but very high, liked to be called Father), who had been attached to our church when I was a child. He was very old by then and was talking about being taken under Lang's wing when he, Father L, worked in the East End before the war. I think a lot of those priests, like our own Father L, were homosexuals, which is not of course to say that Lang was.

[coughingbear]

It may well have been - though Beaken's argument is not so much that he engineered the abdication (& he argues that Lang did make a bit of an effort to get on with Edward VIII, somewhat hampered by having been close to George V, and then by E VIII's clear lack of interest in the Church/religion) as that he discussed the situation with Baldwin regularly, and eventually agreed with him that abdication was the only option. He quotes a letter from Lang to Baldwin which certainly appears to have been meant to support Baldwin's resolve to press for this.

Lang clearly did take quite a lot of clergy under his wing at various times, and was close to lots of them, but I think Beaken's quite convincing in arguing that there isn't really the evidence to say 'he was a repressed homosexual'. Some of the letters he wrote and received are very emotional, but sometimes we make up that Victorians were repressed in general, when extravagant emotional outpourings by letter could be perfectly acceptable.

[shezan]

Blast! "Greece: The Hidden Centuries" is 14 euros at Amazon.fr. You'd tempted me.

[coughingbear]

That's the trouble with Kindles, I can't lend it to you when I've finished.

[ravurian]

WRT Hobb, I thought it quite clear that she began writing without a story, and wandered around for at least two books trying to discover one. I think it was only at the end of book two that she caught a glimpse of it, and only midway through book three that she started to try to shoe-horn it in. I think that if she knew then what she knows now, she could have built a strong and dynamic trilogy in the vein of her others. As it stands, I was reading more from loyalty and hope than in sincere investment, and that saddened me. Do you think she's now 'too big' to edit, like Anne Rice?

All this aside, I remain cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Fool/Fitz trilogy. She is, in my opinion, at her best in stories containing the Fool, in whichever iteration.

[coughingbear]

That all sounds very likely; I was so glad once she'd killed off most of the pointlessly Bad Guys by the end of the second book so we could move on a bit, but having just re-read the earlier books and been blown away once more by the way she brings things together in the Tawny Man books, these are nothing like as good. I love the world-building, but every time I thought that a long-standing plot point was going to burst into flower (as over the fingerprints, or Tarman), it just sagged rather damply.

I hope it's not that she's too big to edit. I think it's just as likely that she started exploring this aspect of her world and got a bit lost. And I think she knows that anything with the Fool and Fitz is going to be judged by very high standards.