This time the reading offer for the month arrives almost at the end of the month itself. A good illustration of a period incredibly busy with work and other good reasons (some of which I will disclose on this blog in the following weeks). Anyway, I still found some (residual) time for good books, and here they are.
- Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII by Gareth Russell. Unsurprisingly, after having read all Hilary Mantel’s books on Cromwell, I had some appetite to read some non-fiction about the less well-known protagonists of that period. Who better than Catherine Howard? Moreover, this biography also shed some light on the court itself and its intrigues, and it makes for quite an enjoyable reading.
2. Congo by David Van Reybrouck. From the past to a (violent) present, in the long history of a tormented place still at war today. “Epic yet eminently readable, penetrating and profoundly moving, ‘Congo’ traces the fate of one of the world’s most devastated countries, second only to war-torn Somalia: the Democratic Republic of Congo.With a span of several hundred years and an enormous cast of characters, ‘Congo’ chronicles the most dramatic episodes of the nation’s history, the people and events that have determined Congo’s development – from the slave trade to the ivory and rubber booms; from the arrival of Henry Morton Stanley and his meeting with Dr Livingstone to the brutal regime of Belgium’s King Leopold II; from the struggle for independence to Mobutu’s exploitative rule; and from Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s world-famous ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ to the civil war over natural resources that began in 1996 and still rages today.”
3. Gentleman Jack: A biography of Anne Lister, Regency Landowner, Seducer and Secret Diarist by Angela Steidele. There is a BBC TV series out there, so I have decided I need to read the real story first. And this one looks something indeed. “Anne Lister’s journals were so shocking that the first person to crack their secret code hid them behind a fake panel in his ancestral home. Anne Lister was a Regency landowner, an intrepid world traveller … and an unabashed lover of other women. In this bold new biography, prizewinning author Angela Steidele uses the diaries to create a portrait of Anne Lister as we’ve never seen her before: a woman in some ways very much of her time and in others far ahead of it. Anne Lister recorded everything from the most intimate details of her numerous liaisons through to her plans to make her fortune by exploiting the coal seams under her family estate in Halifax and her reaction to the Peterloo massacre. She conducted a love life of labyrinthine complexity, all while searching for a girlfriend who could provide her with both financial security and true love.“
What are you busy with right now? Fiction, non-fiction, poetry…? Please do let me know in the comments or on social media. Happy reading, everyone!
I got most of the way through Anne Lister’s remarkable story in the title you highlight, and feel so guilty enough now that I shall definitely finish it soon! I think I was waiting for a second series from the BBC to persuade me to complete it; it’s definitely eye-opening, and extraordinary to think that her contemporaries and near neighbours the Brontë sisters would not only have heard of her but been fascinated by her.
I can understand why. Just finished it and,well, it was an amazing reading! 🙂