Boy am I behind! Let's get crackin'...
A lot of Tudor books lately. "The Tudors" by Peter Ackroyd was pretty good. It was mostly about Henry VIII, but that's to be expected. He hit the high points of all of their reigns.
"Tudor Conspiracy" by C. W. Gortner was interesting fiction about the plot to take down Queen Mary and replace her with Elizabeth. Brendan Prescott serves both the queen and Elizabeth, helping Mary discover others who are out to get her without implicating Elizabeth. A daunting task, to be sure.
"Piercing" by Ryu Murakami was disturbing and twisted, so I thoroughly enjoyed it :) New father Kawashima Masayuki (I hope I spelled that right, I can't read my own handwriting) has fantasies about stabbing his baby daughter with an ice pick. Rather than give in to such sick ideas, he hired a prostitute to stab instead. But he gets more than he bargained for when Chiaki shows up. Chiaki is severely damaged in her own way and their showdown was gruesome and tense.
I read a great interview a few months ago with Stephen King and his family, and they mentioned how much they all liked Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves", so I had to read it. It was complex and I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. It's one of those books that has to sink in, I think. It was several stories all intertwined in one: Johnny Truant finds a manuscript in an apartment of dead man about a house that had a never ending hallway. There were many books and papers written about the Navidson family's strange house, and the old blind man, Zampano, was collecting and writing about. Reading the manuscript and all the other research he has compiled makes Johnny go insane. At least, it seems that way. The structure of the book was really interesting: there were footnotes and parts printed upside down, sideways, backwards. It was definitely one of those books that you have to work for and can't read with one eye while doing something else, which is what I tend to do a lot.
"Poppet" by Mo Hayder was another excellent chilling suspense. Man can this woman write! Residents in an mental home are all suffering from the same delusion: that there is a ghost called The Maud who is hurting them, killing them off one by one. Is it a delusion, though, or is someone really torturing these poor confused people? AJ is trying to find out if there's a connection between The Maud and a recently released patient who murdered his parents when he was a kid named Isaac who has a taste for making little dolls, or poppets, using pieces of people. Fun stuff!
I liked Therese Anne Fowler's "Z: a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald" more than I thought I would. Full disclaimer: I don't like F. Scott Fitzgerald. To be fair, I've only read "The Great Gatsby", but I had to read it three times as an undergrad and I *hated* it. When the movie came out earlier this year my sister wanted to read the book and asked me about it and I told her I would rather light myself on fire than read that drivel again. I really would. That being said, I find his wife fascinating, and I thought Fowler did a good job of bringing Zelda to life. Everything they did was on such an over the top scale, I'm sure it was exhausting. No wonder her mind broke down.
Donald Driver is one of Green Bay's all time best receivers. In "Driven", he talks about how he got to the top through hard work and the love of his family, and how wonderful it was to play with Brett. He has respect for certain people that I can't abide because of the way they treated the great number 4, but hey, he doesn't want to make enemies. I have no such qualms :)
"Mrs. Poe" by Lynn Cullen was a fictionalized account of how Edgar Allan Poe and poet Frances Osgood's affair may have gone, if indeed they did have an affair (it's debatable). I enjoyed it, it was kind of dark and spooky, like Poe himself.
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