Ancient & Medieval Historical Fiction discussion
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Happy New Year Everyone - no matter where in the world you are.
Monica wrote: "LOL...It's not yet 4:30 the afternoon of New Year's Eve..."
4.30 in the arvo? Well then, you should be starting on snacks, dips and first drinks. :)
happy wrote: "Happy New Year Everyone - no matter where in the world you are."Happy NYE to you too, happy. See you in 2013 when you get here.
Terri wrote: "Monica wrote: "LOL...It's not yet 4:30 the afternoon of New Year's Eve..."
4.30 in the arvo? Well then, you should be starting on snacks, dips and first drinks. :)"
:) Yes, right on schedule!
I missed the party! I fell asleep waiting for the ball to drop! Now it is three a.m. and I'm going through my email.
Welcome to 2013, Linda. :-)
We had a great night with the kids last night, eating snacks and playing video games. We just made the ball drop in NY (on the tv) we were having so much fun! Happy New Year everyone!
Happy New Year everyone!May 2013 be a year of good health, joy and prosperity for all. :)
Happy new year! May we all read many great books in 2013.
Tasha wrote: "We had a great night with the kids last night, eating snacks and playing video games. We just made the ball drop in NY (on the tv) we were having so much fun! Happy New Year everyone!"
Lucky NY had your families extensive brain power on hand or the ball would never have dropped and NY would be in disarray. Well done Tasha and kids. :D
My fellow Mod Dawn was there in person watching it!! I didn't watch the NY NYE celebrations on tele..so I didn't see her. :)
Happy New Year to you too Dave and Kate. May your books have a great 2013! :)
arg...Goodreads is deathly slow. Apparently it is across the site so if you too are suffering a slow Goodreads today, it is not just you.
A number of websites have been slow the past couple of days ... must be end of holiday malaise syndrome.
Everyone might have been hungover with nothing to do but lay around playing on the web and using book gift cards they got for Xmas and then adding their books to Goodreads. :-) Also, most people in my friends list were joining the challenge again. Quantify that across the site which has over 10 million members...That would have created extra load in the site for sure.
You know Terri, tonight I was scrolling the discussions and I re-read the first part of the Anti-Body-Rippers thread. It can still make me laugh out loud.
:-) I have not read it for a while. But whenever I think of the 'scenes' with Dawn and I it still makes me smile. It made me laugh so hard!
Food for your brain, then: I subscribed to a newsletter proposing Kindle freebies, and one of the ebooks proposed today was: Taken By Moonlight (Sensual Paranormal Historical Romance).I guess you could choose this one for next month group reading...(I didn't dare to click to see the cover).
Oh yeah, that would go down well in the polls. Our members would think we have 'turned'. :D
Bit late but happy new year to you all.Sensual Paranormal Historical Romance? Whatever next?
Same to you Tim. Your first Xmas and New Years in the US. Hope you didn't miss home too much.
Okay. Think Iam in RANDOM THOUGHTS. I got ASUS for Christmas. Don't know what it is or what I am to do with it. I finally asked husband, and he said, "Just play around with it, and you will figure it out." Don't lol yet. I am playing with it but have to go to Nook to find out the game I am playing. How much do these things cost? Did Santa waste money on me? If any of you have one of these ASUS. things,let me know. IRONICALLY, I am in the cloud on this gadget. I was born in a cloud and have never been out of it. I am a dreamer, and dreamers are in the clouds. Could it be that I knew ASUS before it knew me. You may lol now.
Haven't a foggiest clue what ASUS is, Linda, but that makes for a funnier story. Enjoy. ?
Asus is a brand of computer Linda. Do you have a new Asus computer, laptop or tablet? I am a little befuddled as to what you mean also. :)
It is an ASUS tablet that is as large as a laptop. Terri, you know about computers while I do not. If you are befuddled, imagine how I feel? LolI will be serious now. The ASUS tablet does everything that my pc will do. I can hook up the printer and print stuff. I want to use it but am wary because it is fast, books that I had downloaded on Kindle are already on this ASUS. I believe that would be because it operates on a cloud--adding info, killing viruses, etc., automatically. I will figure it out. Trying to add a little levity in this first week of the new year. Thanks for your interest.
It seems a really luxury tablet, Linda.A good thing about this stuff is that they're usually the plug-and-play kind, so you've have already received the right suggestion: just relax and enjoy. It won't blow up, I promise. I hope you left extra cookies for Santa this Xmas..
Thank you, ladies, for your input.I left lots of treats for Santa.
Ah, so it is an Asus tablet. I suspected maybe that's what you had.You will be perfectly okay with it, Linda. You had to start from scratch with your eReaders and now, so too must you learn the tablet from scratch.
:-)
You all gave me support. With your patience (sp), I can learn to do this too. Thanks Terri for putting into words what my anxiety was about.
When reading a book, paper or e, I want to see the page number on every page. I want to see the title and the author in small print in the top corner margin on every other page. The page number is both a psychological and a scheduling matter. The author and title I never forget if I see them on every other page.
I need to see the page number too. This was an annoyance when I was trying eBooks on my Tablet via the Kindle app. I had to touch the screen to see what page I was on,
Hello iPad users,Answer me this....
We have a couple members tackling their new iPads. How do you copy and paste on the iPad?
i dont think you can if you are using the app. you can in website as normal.after i posted today i messed around trying to do it.
Ah, okay. So it is the GR app that might cause problems with copy and paste.
I'm curious as to why Jean Plaidy's books are not considered kosher in this group. I don't see how she can be considered as writing romances.
@Mickey(with your comments in the Wars of the Roses thread) It's true the marketing isn't in an author's hands and she may not have chosen titles, never mind covers. I've always avoided her. Maybe the marketers have led me astray. But her subject seems to be queens, queens and more queens.
She does focus on queens, but this does not mean that she writes romances (under the pseudonym Jean Plaidy) or that her books would fall under melodrama, which is what I think the objection to her is. This group is unisex, right? I don't understand how the lives of queens would not be of interest unless it is simply the old adage about men objecting to reading books from a female perspective. She did write several books about kings, though. I've already mentioned King Phillip II of Spain. I know she wrote at least one of King Henry IV of France. But I don't understand why it's important to show she wrote from a male perspective if this group is open to both.
I can only say, for myself, I can't stand the stifled life women lived, in a fair few times and places -- even for a visit -- and in my fiction, I'm afraid to be stuck in the women's quarters. So my books have to be about both sexes, or the sex that got out of the house, or about unconventional women. Or societies that were less sexist.
Mickey - I read a Jean Plaidy once. It was not bad for what it was and I would not say it is un-kosher because one can read whatever one likes. I did find it focused more on the inner feelings of the fictionalised historical person than it did on events and history. It seemed to me 'neither fish nor fowl' because it was not a bodice-ripper (which I also like and had expected from the cover), yet it did not really explore the historical context either.
Just my two cents worth.
Your preferences are perfectly understandable, but they are subjective and particular to you. That women led stifled lives is a generalization. I don't think Queen Victoria was stifled or Queen Elizabeth I.
Hi Mickey,Sorry, I went to bed last night and am only coming to the conversation now.
The thing is, nobody said Jean Plaidy was kosher. If Jean Plaidy has written a unisex book that is focused on historical content and not focused on emotional elements then people are welcome to include the book in our threads.
We have plenty of authors such as Sharon Kay Penman and Gillian Bradshaw mentioned in the threads. There are as many books on Queens and books by female authors mentioned and recommended in this group as we do male authored books and characters.
As yet I don't think we have even had more than two group reads that were even on a King.
We have books in the polls that have a female main characters, and we have books in the group reads that were written by women.
I cannot make people vote them in as the monthly group read, but some have been. So I don't know where all this is coming from.
I even have a couple female character novels up my sleeve for future Polls.
I respect that you love your Plaidy. Nobody here would ever look down on her, or you for reading them.
It is just that there is no group on GR that focuses on the books we focus on. Unisex (books that both men and women read...and they do or they wouldn't be talking about them and voting them in during Group Reads) and high adventure. I do realise that some of those books that have men on their covers (high adventure) are marketed at men. But in this group they are read by both sexes.
We are a nice group of people who enjoy each others company and enjoy talking books and history.
Fair, considered and respectful discussion (not discussion that makes out as if the group is sexist which is mind blowing to me.. because I am very much a woman and my fellow Moderator dawn is very much a woman, and half our active members are women) is always welcome. :)
Jean Plaidy is probably one of the first authors anyone of a certain age encountered when they first explored historical fiction from the medieval period onwards.I have always found her research to be excellent and the small details of everyday life fascinating. She did lean heavily on Agnes Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England", but that was probably the major reference source at the time she was writing.
Her Queens of England series were probably the high point of her writing career. Each volume was written as though it was the autobiography of the said Queen. I thought the ones on Mary I and Catherine of Braganza were the best of them.
And please, to those members not familiar with the groups rules, I must express this.The group rules include this one, which was set up during the formation of the group by the Group Founder Ireney.
Absolutely no romantic historical fiction of melodramatic, tear-inducing kinds.
Don't blame me. I did not make the rules, but as the moderator, I have to enforce them. People should read the rules when they join and then there might be more tolerance and understanding of what we are doing in here, because we are very up front and it should not be held against us that we are not something else.
Margaret wrote: "Jean Plaidy is probably one of the first authors anyone of a certain age encountered when they first explored historical fiction from the medieval period onwards.I have always found her research ..."
My Mum used to try and make me read her in highschool. :)
But I was more interested in Julie Campbell's Trixie Belden books. I was always into the high adventure. lol.
Not that we can't cry over our books, which we also do, in a non-sex-discriminatory fashion. :D
Terri wrote: "Margaret wrote: "Jean Plaidy is probably one of the first authors anyone of a certain age encountered when they first explored historical fiction from the medieval period onwards.I have always fo..."
I read both! :D I think the day I discovered Historical Mysteries was the best day of my life. LOL. Combined two of my favorite areas of reading.
The thing about Jean Plaidy is that she was unique. She wrote Gothic romances as Virginia Holt, romantic sagas as Phillipa Carr, but "Jean Plaidy" was an attempt to render much of Britain's history into a palatable novel form for the general public that found history boring. People tend to focus on her Tudor era books, but forget that she wrote from William the Conqueror right through to Victoria. There is little "romance" in her books, excepting where it is a matter of public record (John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough's overwhelming love for his wife Sarah, for example).
That is why I think I keep trying to go back to mysteries. Because I cut my teeth on mysteries via Trixe Belden! :DI have had some hits and misses in historical mystery. I am glad to have found The King's Spy (the group read) and the C.J. Sansom series.
And I will be trying the Sister Fidelma series this year starting with Absolution by Murder and also the Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael series.
Ancient & Medieval Historical Fiction
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Yeah. What's taking you so long? :-)"
LOL...It's not yet 4:30 the afternoon of New Year's Eve here in the Pacific Northwest USA! We've got a ways to go, but don't wait for us, we'll get there eventually!