“save our troubles for another day / go with me we’ve got it made / let me take you on an escapade”

[larryhammer]

A book meme swiped from muccamukk:

General Questions

This week I’m reading: The Grass Crown, Colleen McCullough, a reread by way of reading through the Masters of Rome series, which I previously left off after book 4.
My favorite book of all time is: Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin.
My current favorite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months): Persuasion, Jane Austen, which also contends for the previous. (The book I most recently reread, if that’s what this is asking, is Sage Empress, Sherwood Smith.)
The last book I bought was: The October Horse, Colleen McCullough
The first book I bought with my own money: Too long ago, no idea.
The first book I received as a gift: Too long ago, no idea. I cannot remember not having/receiving many books.
The last book I received as a gift was: There were a handful all at once this past holiday season, the one I remember is The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar
The last book I borrowed from the library: The Trouble with Magic, Ruth Chew
The book physically closest to me right now: A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, rev ed., Paul W. Kroll
Do you read bookfic, and if so what is your favorite bookshop fic? I mostly only read bookfic, as I understand the term, but not very many fics set, either by canon or AU, in bookshops. Am I misreading this question?

This or That

[aka the false binaries section, imposition of dichotomies division]
Physical book or e-book: Yes.
Used or new: Yes.
Fiction or non-fiction: Yes.
Read at a coffee shop or at the park: Yes.
Paperback or hardcover: Paperback, says my wrists.
Romance or Crime: Romance.

Yes or No

[aka the other false binaries section, denial of continuums division]
Stream of consciousness? Rarely.
Poetry? Hard yes.
Memoirs? Rarely.
Philosophy? Sometimes.
Thrillers? Hard no.
Chronicles? Sometimes.
Dialogue heavy? This is so orthogonal to my reading choices it’s a meaningless question.

---L.

Subject quote from Escapade, Janet Jackson.

Comments

[sovay]

The Grass Crown, Colleen McCullough, a reread by way of reading through the Masters of Rome series, which I previously left off after book 4.

I have never read any of her Roman novels. Talk to me about them?

[asakiyume]

Dichotomies neatly handled!

[larryhammer]

The four I've read are not really novels so much as narratives cut off after about 900 pages with an episode that is more or less a good pause -- making it a long river running from Marius's marriage to Julia aka Caesar's aunt (and setting up his first consulship) down to Tony & Cleo's last stand. They are dense and detailed, for McCullough has done her homework (Judith Tarr once called the first book The First Laundry List of Rome), but they are vivid and compelling. McCullough has definite opinions about how and why the Republic crumbled into autocracy, and dramatizes it well. I didn't finish it not because of disinterest, but because there was long enough wait after book 4 that I never got around to book 5.

One place in her adaptation I found especially interesting, the Catiline Affair. She has a long appendix justifying departing from the standard history, arguing that our only primary source, Cicero, had a self-interest in fudging the order of events, to make himself look good, and her proposed chronology does indeed make more sense than his version.

I am, at the moment, watching the slow breakdown in the relations between Marius and his former right-hand man, Sulla.

[larryhammer]

Both the false and the true?

[sovay]

One place in her adaptation I found especially interesting, the Catiline Affair. She has a long appendix justifying departing from the standard history, arguing that our only primary source, Cicero, had a self-interest in fudging the order of events, to make himself look good, and her proposed chronology does indeed make more sense than his version.

I may be convinced to check that one out because the two fictional treatments of Catiline I have read are very different from one another and I would be interested to see how McCullough's differs from them.

(John Maddox Roberts' The Catiline Conspiracy (1991) and Steven Saylor's Catilina's Riddle (1993). I discovered the latter series in high school and the former in college and tapped out around 2000–2001 on both except for Saylor's A Gladiator Dies Only Once (2005) which I can remember packing up with the rest of my library, but I haven't read a lot of Roman Republican fiction since.)

[larryhammer]

I'm interested in hearing your comparison. (Cataline is covered in book 3, Fortune's Favorite, fwiw.)