Time to let go?

When I was 10 or 11, visiting my grandparents, I came across a copy of "Elizabeth the Great" by Elizabeth Jenkins. Since then I have, to varying degrees, been obsessed with the various versions of the Tudor story -- mostly nonfiction, though more recently supplemented by fiction (I like to call this genre Tudor Trash) and movies. Antonia Fraser, David Starkey, Alison Weir -- I've read them all. Obviously, from looking at the sales numbers for Philippa Gregory or the investment of the Showtime tv show "The Tudors," I'm not alone. And why not? It's an insanely dramatic story with so many elements: sex, politics, religion, birth, death. I've watched the old Glenda Jackson miniseries and I'm still bitter that Cate Blanchett was robbed of her richly deserved Oscar for "Elizabeth." But I'm afraid this 30-year affair may be over. "The Tudors" is enjoyable as camp, but I can't really buy it. More worrisome, "The Other Boleyn Girl" left me cold. "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" didn't live up to its predecessor and managed to sap the swagger (and acting ability) from Clive Owen. And now, Alison Weir's second novel, "The Lady Elizabeth," is ... boring. Yep, that could well be due to the writing not the story. But what if it's really over? What if I'm just sick of this story?

Well, there's always the Stuarts and the drama of the English Civil War. But those Puritans just aren't much fun. In the meantime, I'm going back into the archives to see if there's any spark left. The college library has a pretty decent collection of movies on VHS, should you still have a working VCR, and I happened to bring home a 1940 swashbuckler called "The Sea Hawk." Errol Flynn is Capt. Thorpe, a Sir Francis Drake-like privateer, and Flora Robson is Elizabeth. Next, I'll have to check out "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex," with Flynn again and Bette Davis as Elizabeth. And, in an earlier wave of Tudor novelization mania, Jean Plaidy wrote a whole series that I've never read. Maybe they'll renew my obsession.

Other reading? I finished Tony Horwitz's new book, "A Voyage Long and Strange." He's in fine historical travelogue style -- not as good as "Confederates in the Attic" but that's a very high bar indeed and I like it better than "Blue Latitudes." Look for a review in Solares Hill when I get to writing it. And I was inspired by an NPR piece on Kate Christensen winning the PEN/Faulkner award to see if the public library had any of her books. They have several and I just finished her first, "In the Drink," which is very good. I read about 60 pages of the new Alison Weir (fulfilling the Nancy Pearl 100-minus-your-age-page-rule -- minimum page number before abandoning a book) and turned to the "Unaccustomed Earth," the new Jhumpa Lahiri story collection for relief.

I'm back!

Yes, this blog hit a sophomore slump for awhile there. But I have been reading and even reviewing, if not writing about it in this forum. My latest was a book called "Literary Seductions" by Frances Wilson -- I saw it referred to somewhere, looked it up in our catalogue at work and got it through interlibrary loan. Last weekend, I read it. It was OK though not to my standard of high-end literary gossip/lives for regular readers ("Parallel Lives" by Phyllis Rose being my high watermark in the genre). It was kind of a hybrid between academic treatise and layperson read. Maybe that's how they do it in the UK. Anyway a decent read. But not as good as the previous one, "Wild Nights!" by Joyce Carol Oates, which I have reviewed for an upcoming edition of Solares Hill. I know, I know, JCO's prodigious output can be intimidating. And I even made sure to write this review without using the word "prolific." But this is a good one, maybe because it's also on the literary lives vein -- but with the Oatesean twists of eerieness and weirdness pushed a few shoves beyond comfort level.

The stories are all very different from one another, which is good, and makes it difficult to choose a favorite. I might have liked the first one the least, perhaps because of all the writers I've read the least Poe, perhaps because the 19th century diary style was a tad offputting. The Emily Dickinson robot story is savagely funny, the Hemingway story full of pathos. And, in an additional Key West link, the book is dedicated to Joyce and Seward Johnson, of sculpture and Key West Literary Seminar scholarship fame.

I also read "The Princess of Burundi," another Swedish mystery, this one by Kjell Eriksson (and from the FKCC collection). I thought it was a better read than "Sun Storm," and I enjoyed a little brain candy. But I think I'm done with the Swedish mystery genre for the moment -- my list of other reading, for review and for the upcoming seminar, is just too long. Fortunately the next is a combo: Tony Horwitz's new book, "A Voyage Long and Strange," about European interactions in the New World between Columbus and the Pilgrims. "Confederates in the Attic" is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books, so I'm hoping Horwitz is on form with this one.