I, Claudius by Robert Graves

If, by some quirk in the time-space continuum, I was able to time travel, probably one of the last places I would want to end up would be ancient Rome. It’s not the food, the constant wars, or the public toilets that bother me (derail: sat on one of those at a Roman archeological dig in Israel—I prefer to do my business when I don’t have a neighbor’s butt about five inches from mine). Nope, it’s about the murdering—the constant, constant murdering.

When I set down Robert Graves’s I, Claudius for the final time, I tried to figure out how many of the main and secondary characters had been taken out by poisoning, bludgeoning, or neglect. It’s a pretty staggering number. We have mothers killing daughters by walling them up in a room and listening to them starve to death, grandmothers gradually poisoning grandsons, and emperors getting their jaws hacked off by assassins. Neither rank nor blood can protect you from an inevitable and unnatural death.

Unless, of course, you’re an idiot. Or, at least, you’re perceived as an idiot, like the titular Claudius. Born twisted, small, and with a dreadful stammer, Claudius is immediately discounted by his family, a powerful combination of Claudians and Caesars. When he’s not being the punching bag for his mother, grandmother, sister, or a whole host of other family members, he spends his time learning and observing. It’s this quiet behavior that allows him to watch the goings-on unharmed. Claudius watches as Rome goes through three emperors: Augustus (who you might recognize as Octavian from Rome), Tiberius, and Caligula, the “little boot” who nearly ran Rome into the ground.

Throughout, I had trouble deciding whether Claudius was in fact an idiot or not. True, much of his perceived idiocy comes from his self-imposed dumb show, but the situations that he puts himself in are kind of ludicrous. Maybe it’s the comparison between him and his brother Germanicus that makes Claudius come out looking out of it, cowardly, and unmanly in the Roman sense. Then again, Claudius outlived his brother, so that shows how much I know. I’m sure that I might find the answers to my questions in the sequel, Claudius the God, where Claudius comes up against the challenge of his life as emperor. And I'll also end up hiring someone to taste-test my food as my poison paranoia grows.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

I had mentioned in my post about The White Queen that I occasionally like to avoid more taxing reading material by diving into a world of harmless, mediocre historical fiction. I try not to make it too much of a habit, but I’m not going to beat myself over the head when my job does such a fine job of doing that for me. However, I am often surprised at the number of quality historical fiction authors there are out there. They clearly immerse themselves in research and not only entertain, but elucidate. You can close the novel, pick up a history book, and immediately identify with the time, making history just that much more understandable to the modern mind—all without relying on bodice-ripper tactics and other-worldly influences. Hilary Mantel is one of those authors.

Mantel’s Wolf Hall, the 2009 Man Booker Prize winner, takes a markedly different approach to the turbulent Tudor era than most. Instead of taking place in the cushioned boudoirs of England’s ruling women, the reader spends most of the time in Thomas Cromwell’s odd little world, where a common blacksmith’s son is raised up to the highest political positions in the land. Cromwell is a walking, talking contradiction. A solid man covered in the scars of his many former trades, he blends in with the lily-white delicates of the English court. He is a former soldier and brawler, yet he conducts business with far more subtlety than nobles who have been bred to the position (most notably the bombastic Duke of Norfolk). He understands the machinations of Anne Boleyn, but seems completely mystified by the women in his own home.

Cromwell’s foil is Sir Thomas More (note: the sheer amount of Thomases in this book is ridiculous—so ridiculous that Cromwell wryly comments about it to himself), the world-renowned intellectual with a violent streak. Cromwell has the flexibility of mind to transfer his services from the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey to the king. More, unfortunately for him, sticks firmly to his worldview, one where everyone from the king down follows the True Church. Their wry interactions and respect-bordering-on-contempt for each other are almost touching, considering the two ultimately suffer the same fate.

The book isn’t without its flaws. Mantel’s cast of hundreds makes it difficult to follow without a background in this history or a very thorough viewing of The Tudors. She also uses the convention of referring to Cromwell as “he” constantly, never really mentioning his name unless another character utters it. I can understand her reasoning behind this style, as the reader can be totally immersed in the character, but it is terribly annoying. When Cromwell interacts with other male characters, which is most of the time, it’s crazy complicated keeping everyone straight. Yet, the book is a valiant work of seriously absorbing literature. I hear through the grapevine that Mantel will be coming out with a sequel, so my Kindle and I will wait with bated breath.

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

I have a confession to make: I’ve been known to read trashy books. Now, this isn’t something that I like to shout from the rooftops, but if you spent your days reading Chaucer, you would unwind with something less cerebral too. I’ve done the romance novel thing, but the formula becomes grating after a while. So, my most turned to brainless literature is mediocre historical fiction.

I don’t think Philippa Gregory started out as a mediocre artist. Her break-out novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, was pretty gripping and presented a side of that worn out Tudor saga that I hadn’t heard before. Unfortunately, her work has started to go down a long, dull hill. She’s now turning her attention to the final years of the Plantagenet reign over English with The White Queen.

The White Queen follows the rise of Elizabeth Woodville, a commoner widow, who captures the eye of the young King Edward IV and rises to be the queen of the penultimate reign of a Plantagenet monarch. This period of time has been much discussed by artists and historians as an era of greed and blood. Many a historian has portrayed Edward IV’s queen as the head of a family of grasping bloodsuckers who wormed their way into the highest positions in the kingdom, much like the Boleyns a few generations later. Shakespeare even dedicated his pen to a play based on the period: Richard III. There’s an incredible amount to tell and so many points of view to take in.

Unfortunately, Gregory decides to take the least believable route. Inspired by the whispers of witchcraft that surrounded the Woodville family (which was supposedly descended from a water goddess), Gregory portrays Elizabeth Woodville, her mother, and daughter Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth, wife of Henry VII) as practitioners of wizardry. What made Edward fall for Elizabeth? A ring tied to a string. What made a boat carrying important dignitaries toss violently over the sea? A storm called up by witches’ breath. What withers Richard III’s sword arm and cripples his health? A curse and a locket. Really, Philippa, really?

I think her choice in plot devices shows an author taking the easy way out. Elizabeth Woodville, whether you liked her or not, was a force to be reckoned with. She defied an ordained king by claiming sanctuary for herself and her children in a basement. She suffered through accusations that her husband had been a bastard, sired by a lowly English bowman. She climbed to the highest position in the land and hung there through some of the greatest storms in English royal history. And Gregory credits it to witchcraft? Ugh.

Seriously, if you find this era interesting, pick up Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour, a hefty novel that relies on history and the strength of the characters. Gregory would indeed need witchcraft to reach her standard of work. Sadly, I’m probably going to end up reading Gregory’s next book, which will be a depiction of the same events, just from the point of view of Margaret Beaufort, mother to Henry Tudor. I will grit my teeth in irritation, then maybe through my Kindle in the trash, but I will read it shamefaced. Why am I so weak?!

My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Family's Past by Ariel Sabar

I'm very lucky that my job has introduced me to books and authors that I wouldn't normally hear of in the mainstream media. Besides Tatiana de Rosnay and Jeffrey Zaslow (who's signed book is waiting to be read shortly), none of the authors have been featured very prominently on my local bookstores or featured in the myriad of newspapers that I get on my desk each day. I doubt I would have even glanced at My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Family's Past by Ariel Sabar as I walked by the rows of spines on the bookshelves.

My Father's Paradise spans decades, centuries. Sabar's father, Yona, came from a small Jewish village in northern Iraq, a town in the middle of river where Kurds of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim descent lived together peacefully for centuries. After the establishment of Israel, Jews are thrown out of Iraq, making their way to a new land and a new life.

This may just seem like another Jewish diaspora to repatriation book, but Yona Sabar has a singular trait that lifts him out of the poor Kurdish-Israeli neighborhoods and into the vaulted heights of academia: he grew up speaking Aramaic. Without him, the world would have lost the language of Jesus, as Iraqi Kurds now speak mostly Arabic and Israeli Kurds rely on Hebrew. Yona created the first Aramaic dictionary and was even the Aramaic expert for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (don't hold that against him).

Sabar's book may celebrate his father's academic career, but it also charts the journey of Mizrahi Jews (Jews from Arab countries) to an Israel overwhelmed with European Jews. Like other countries around the world, Israel has its own problems with racism and classism. Many Mizrahi Jews hold low-paying blue collar jobs, such as construction or taxi driving. It's a difficult, unfair, under-publicized life that may see more light with the publication of this book.

My Father's Paradise is worth the read, if only to find out a civilization that was once a vital part of the Arab world and now fights for appreciation in the State of Israel.

Sister Teresa by Barbara Mujica

I wish I could say that I liked Sister Teresa, a novel by Barbara Mujica recounting the life of St. Teresa of Ávila. I even read it twice to convince myself that there was something to the book that I just hadn't found. But, alas.

Granted, Mujica's Teresa is an interesting, multi-faceted character. She's not a sweet saint-- she manipulative, ruthless, loving, and intellectual, a woman to be respected even over a backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition. It's not the characterization that gets me, it's the writing style.

I know I harp on writing style a lot in these reviews, but it truly affects my ability to fully enjoy a book. I also think that it's a bit of a cop out to use a a fictional, modern-day translator who only appears one time in the whole novel, just to be able to be rid of some of your own writing responsibility. Mujica's translator mentions that she found this hagiography in a market and tried to make the prose sound as informal as possible, leading to a novel full of anachronistic language. It takes me out of the time period, leaving me consciously out of the story. Frustrating.

I don't really want to expend any more words on this book. Suffice it to say that if you're interested in Inquistion-era Spain, nunneries, or saints, this is a book you can afford to spend a few minutes on. Otherwise, give it a miss.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

It's a rare writer that can make an atom personable. Based on our science books, an atom is a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons. They combine into molecules, which then combine with other molecules, which then becomes the reason I failed chemistry class. If we rely on a textbook, of course an atom is going to be a dead thing.

It's too bad that our text books aren't written by Bill Bryson, author of A Short History of Nearly Everything and many other fine works. Bryson can give an atom life of it's own, a personality, the entirely real sense that atoms are the most important part of our lives. It's not just a numbered figure on an impersonal page.

Bryson, an immensely talented writer, brings all of science to life in this book, a rare feat. He disabuses us of the notion of eternal truths, for example, demonstrating that until just the middle of the last century plate tectonics was not accepted as a viable theory. He destroys the archetype of the all-knowing scientists and shows them at their most vulnerable and ingenious. Most disturbingly, he lays out all of the myriad ways that our planet and universe is trying to kill us.

As you can probably guess, I am a science dumbass. I scraped through three years of high school science and two semesters of similar college classes with smiles and a cheerfully frank self-assessment that though I may try my hardest, I am never going to successfully balance a chemical equation or triangulate the distance to the moon. With Bryson, however, I am introduced to the personalities behind the theorems: venerable, yet staid Lord Kelvin, egotistical Hubble, prickly Newton, thieving Hooke, and (my favorite) painfully shy Cavendish. Science is more than just fact and theory-- it is a violent clashing of egos and dogma, a bureaucratic beast as slow-moving as religion itself.

It will take more than a few reads to truly understand the science portrayed in A Short History of Nearly Everything, though Bryson has made a valiant effort to make everything readable. Looking on Amazon, it appears that he has come out with an illustrated edition of the book, for which I may need to shell out some cash. It's strange that for a girl that can't tell a mitochondria from a nucleus, such a work can become a favorite work and occupy a coveted spot on the bookshelf.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

I don't think that I've ever stopped and tried to imagine America through an immigrant's eyes. To me, America has always been here. I know intellectually that America as I know it didn't exist until the 18th century, but when you've lived here forever, it's hard to imagine that the skyscrapers, freeways, and roadside monuments didn't just spring out from the ground thousands of years ago. They seem a permanent, indelible part of the landscape.

And yet, that can't be how someone just landing on these shores views America. After all, they came from lands steeped in history, where the land is the only constant. Their ancestors have seen governments fall, villages and cities disappear from the face of the Earth, once inhabitable climates turned poisonous. It is this resignation these people bring to America, a land blissfully ignorant of upheaval. Today's America is no place for history.

It is this concept that Neil Gaiman explores in American Gods, a masterpiece of a novel that sweeps the whole of the United States. Ancient and foreign gods, having ridden over in the minds and hearts of their worshippers, are woefully out of place in 21st century America. Reduced to grifting, prostitution, and, in two cases, running funeral homes, the gods drift through time with no followers to speak of. On the horizon, the new gods-- lords of technology, media, and freeways-- approach, determined to wipe the old superstitions off of the planet entirely. In the middle, is Shadow, an ex-con who has little to live for and less to fight for.

I don't think an American could have written a book like this. Granted, Gaiman's native United Kingdom does have the same worship of technology and celebrity (magazine shelves are drowning in £1 rags over there), but not to the extent that only the breadth of the American continent can provide. It takes a foreigner to accurately see our obsessions and our affections. Not only that, it takes someone with a sense of history behind them to understand how the ancient can drown in our modern society.

Gaiman tells a wonderful story and I had a hell of a time trying to identify all of the gods he referenced based only on oblique physical traits. Next time, I hope to sit down with my world mythology book and cross reference. I'm sure that such a thing will make a second read even more enjoyable than the first.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

I think there is something strangely beautiful about The Plague. Not what it does to the human body or psyche, but the ease at which nature was (and is) capable of balancing human populations with a wave of bacteria riding Valkyrie-like on the backs of fleas. Strangely enough, people were better off each time the sickness swept through Europe—there was more land, more jobs and more opportunity with less competition. It’s hard to think of the benefits, though, when you’re reading Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.

Brooks’s novel depicts the fictional counterpart to Eyam, a real plague-wracked 17th century English village, which quarantined itself to save its neighbors from the sickness. As the inhabitants begin to die horrifically, people begin to fall back on superstition and barbarity. All this is told through the eyes of Anna Frith, a young widow who mingles with both people of exalted status and the people of the dirt to show the reader just how fear has affected every strata of society. She leads us through a nightmare world where saviors are brought low and healers are destroyed by the ones they sought to cure.

Since college, I have read this book three or four times. Despite my intimate knowledge of the novel, I find myself sucking in breath as the ending draws closer, releasing it only after I have shut the final page. It is a gripping, well-told historical fiction book that is a far sight better than some of the popular period pieces these days, which are more bodice-rippers than anything. The writing is fabulous, but I think it’s the very elemental story that keeps the air locked in my chest. After all, we may have defeated The Plague, but it only takes one antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria to slam the human race back to the Stone Ages. With the ease of travel these days, the ability to voluntarily quarantine ourselves to save others is strikingly diminished—if not defeated all together. Would we have the courage of the real-life inhabitants of Eyam or the fictional ones in Brooks’s novel? I don’t know, but I’m sure that we’ll have a chance to test our mettle some time in the near future.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

Bodies. They pulse and squish, intake and excrete. They do the heavy lifting and the fine-tuning. Bodies. You can’t… well, you can’t live without them. In Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, you can take a look into the (hopefully) distant future to when your body becomes an inanimate object and someone else’s property.

Unfortunately, Roach does not have enough confidence in her subject matter. Instead of allowing very interesting facts to speak for themselves, she crowbars her own feelings, history, and any extraneous material she comes across (no matter how incidental) into paragraphs or footnotes. I get the feeling that is she were enlisted to do a eulogy, she would fill is with puns, asides, and random observations rather than throwing her all into honoring the life of the deceased. I found her style to be so distracting that I was unable to concentrate on the excitement that the inside scoop on corpses should provide.

The saving grace of Stiff is that dead bodies are just so damn interesting. Even for a notably squeamish person, I can’t pretend that finding out what’s going to happen when I die isn’t fascinating. Roach lays out the whole “donating bodies to science” business clearly, outlining everything from full-body donations to anatomy classes to getting a post-mortem facelift by plastic surgeon trainees. And the body farms. You’re just going to have to read about the body farms.

I’ve always been an organ donor, but Stiff has made me wonder if I can do more after death. While I don’t like the idea of moldering out in an open field, I can certainly consider how I want my remains taken care of in the event of a brain death. Why not save my family the hassle and just have a piece of paper that enables doctors to pull the plug and hustle me down to the OR, ready for harvest for people who really need a piece of me? It’s a final good deed that can echo through the generations.