::: Anne Boleyn, also Huzzah!! (aka GoodRave)

[delphipsmith]

OK, on the plus side, I discover that Goodreads has added a "stats" feature. Click on this and it shows you a nice bar chart of how many books you've read in a given year. Click on "details" and you get a pie chart breakdown by category (your own categories). Click on "pages" and it changes to give the number of pages you've read.

It's kick ass. I've updated my info for last three years based on the paper lists I was keeping, so it's pretty impressive ;)

Plus, they answered my question about how to be able to include different language versions on your list, rather than having them collapsed into a single title. So I now have both Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone and Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers, along with both Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter et la chambre des secrets. w00t!!

Finished a new bio of Anne Boleyn yesterday. Being accustomed to Genevieve Bujold in Anne of the Thousand Days, Mr Bernard's Anne was something of a startlement since he assumes she might actually have been guilty of the charges of adultery brought against her, but as historical analyses of primary sources go, he's on pretty solid ground. Given that the earliest biographers (not detractors, but biographers) of Anne were writing during the reign of her daughter Elizabeth, it's not surprising they would have inflated the power, piety and Protestantism of the mother of their beloved queen. Bernard does some scrupulous deconstruction of contemporary sources to demonstrate that in fact Anne might simply have been a beautiful sexy woman who engaged in a few indiscretions and then had the appallingly bad luck to be found out. He still makes some large-ish assumptions, but his logic and his deductions hold up pretty well.

I always thought Genevieve was so beautiful. Until I googled her tonight, however, I had no idea she was the original choice for Capt. Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager!!

And people say the internet isn't useful for education...

Comments

[ennyousai.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I'll definitely have to check out that biography of Anne Boleyn. I'm jonesing for a good bio.

*pokes feebly at pile of early modern German women's studies books*

[delphipsmith]

In general for British bios I highly recommend anything -- yes, anything -- by Antonia Fraser. She's actually Lady Fraser (and a Nobel Laureate, which I didn't know until just now, thank you, Google). Her bio of Charles II is terrific as is her The Wives of Henry VIII. If you want a dramatized bio, the recent Wolf Hall (about Thomas Cromwell) is an interesting read. Quite a different style -- written in the present tense, for one thing, which normally drives me batty but in this case it worked.