Thursday, March 10, 2011

history, marriage, and Monty Python

So last night hubs and I are turning in, and he's already laying down, with a pillow over his head.  The lights are off, and I'm doing my little nightly moisturizing routine, sitting on the edge of the bed.  I say to him, "you know, I've noticed a direct proportional relationship between the amount of time I spend moisturizing, and the care I take of myself in general..." and I proceed to tell him everything that I blogged about the other day.

He lifts the pillow off his head and says, "I've noticed a direct proportionate correlation between the amount of time you spend telling me 'interesting' stories when I'm laying in bed trying to go to sleep, with the amount that I love you."

Silly hubby.

One other thing to share.  I've become completely obsessed with Rhys Bowen's mystery series, Her Royal Spyness.  I've never been a big mystery fan, but this does it for me. It's set in 1932, Depression-Era England. The heroine, Lady Georgianna, is 34th in line for the throne, but her family is completely destitute.  Her father, a Duke of some godforsaken place in Scotland, took his own life after he lost everything in the stock market crash, and left her brother peniless with death duties to pay.  When the series opens, Georgie is still living in Scotland with her brother and sister-in-law Fig, but they're trying to marry her off to some Prince in Austria, and she doesn't want to be married off, so she high-tails it off to the family's house in London.  For the first time in her life she's living without a maid, and she has no money, so she has to figure out how to make it in the big city.  Things like learning to light a fire and dress herself are obstacles to be overcome.  And then people start dying around her, and she has to solve mysteries and save the day even though she is continually underestimated.  I inhale these books, and I'm bummed because I'm on the last one now.  I highly recommend it.

In a completely different time period in British history, I'm also obsessed with Bernard Cornwell's The Saxon Stories, about life in England when it was just a collection of individual kingdoms like Wessex and Mercia.  The leader of Wessex, Alfred the Great, built the first "English" navy to combat the Viking invaders, and foresaw a time when the entire island would be united in one kingdom.  I know next to nothing about this time period, though I want to get some non-fiction about it now that I'm getting into it through these books.  When you say Mercia to me, the first thing I think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Arthur riding since the snows of winter covered this land, through the kingdom of Mercia, where you can't find coconuts, given that it's a temperate zone.  But I'm completely into this period now, and that's one of the reasons I love historical fiction.



It's not a question of where he GRIPS it!

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