The Tudor Fair Blog
Bess of Hardwick: An Elizabethan Woman Who Created Her Own Smart Luck
History can often seem intimidating because it seems like only the stories of dead white men. And there’s a reason for that. The white men were the ones who kept most of the records, being the ones who were educated and literate, and so they are the ones about whom…
Queen or Pope – Catholics in Elizabethan England
Caitlin Moran talks in her book, How to be a Woman, about the idea that often when we discover a particular book, we are suddenly introduced to all its friends, and so join this society that we hadn’t even known existed before. So if you, for example, start reading Dorothy…
The Week in Books: Mary Queen of Scots wasn’t Actually a Catholic Martyr
I’ve been working on a podcast about Mary Queen of Scots, which I’ll be recording this week, and as part of that I’ve been reading John Guy’s book, Queen of Scots (available to read on Oyster, too). Most people who know Elizabethan history are familiar with the story of the tragic Catholic queen,…
The Week in Books
Normally I post on Thursday’s about the books I’ve finished. And I’ve had a ton of time to read while I’ve been away from my daughter and home responsibilities while traveling for my shoulder tests. I read two hours a day, at least. So you’d think I’d have all kinds…
The Week in Books: Shakelton and the Endurance
The fascinating story of Ernest Shakelton and his crew who were trapped in the Antarctic for three years is told in Endurance: Shakelton’s Incredible Journey. Shakelton wanted to be the first person to discover the South Pole. Another explorer took that honor from him, and so he decided to do…
The Week in Books: Caitlin Moran tells me How to Be a Woman
First off, I had an article in The Digital Reader yesterday about NYPL and their Library Simplified project. If you’re at all into libraries, ebooks, and innovation, they are a good group to be watching. So, this week in books. I just finished Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which I…
The Week in Books (and I’m back!)
Ok, so I didn’t drop off the face of the planet before now. Those of you who follow my personal blog as well will know that I broke my shoulder in Chicago at the end of January. I had a nasty surgery with another fracture during surgery when my bone…
The Week in Books: After Birth
I recently finished After Birth by Eliza Albert, a book that struck me because it was described as being honest about the period after a baby is born, which is always portrayed as being this beautiful joyous angelic time, but in reality is anything but. For a lot of women…
The Week in Books: The boring and the totally awesome
In my seemingly never-ending quest to get rid of all my physical books before we move (and buy an ebook of ones worth keeping, but getting rid of the physical book either way) I’ve been going through the stack of books that I’ve kept around which look interesting. One of…
The Week in Books: England before William, the hilarious and the boring
This past week I’ve been reading two books, one of which, by the previously-blogged-about-and-Monty-Python-esque Howard of Warwick was a murder mystery set in a monastery near Lincoln, and the other, a fairly scholarly book about King Oswald and Britain around the time of Bede, was mind-numbingly boring, though based on…
The Week in Books: The Amazing and the Downright Awful
It seems that my love affair with most chick lit is coming to a sad and ugly end. Maybe it’s because I’m not 28 and single any longer, but it just doesn’t appeal to me. Most of what I read that passes for contemporary romance is ridiculously unrealistic, trite, sappy,…
The Week in Books: Island of the Lost
Another fantastic Oyster find, I devoured Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the End of the World by Joan Druett this past week. It’s a true story about two simultaneous shipwrecks on Auckland Island in the 1860’s (though they never met each other, being on opposite ends with a mountain range in…
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