Wolf Hall

Just finished Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009). I read it, all 600 plus pages of it because I am a sucker for a prize winner. It won the Booker last year and I am easily impressed by the glitz and glamour of posh writing prizes, especially those out of the UK.

I had been unsure about Wolf Hall because the only people I had seen reading it were men of a certain age on metros and trains. Men, whose reading taste I feared I would have little in common with; men with bellies starting to bulge from grey suits, watches heavy and shiny on hairy wrists; briefcases tucked between knees, maybe reading a hardback copy but definitely not one from the library. "It seems a man's book," I said to a friend but she assured me she had seen women reading it, too. So I got it out of the library.

In case you don't know, Wolf Hall is about Thomas Cromwell and his rise to power under the reign of Henry VIII and all those shenanigans with divorce and marriage and creating a new religion in which the king is top dog and not Rome. Pardon my lack of articulateness, I feel all the good words got used up in the book. It made me curious to read more of Mantel's work. Does she only do historical fiction? What about short fiction, say a novella?

It is, in my humble opinion, a man's book; politics, detailed history, kings, not much romance, power politics, and diplomacy. Interesting nonetheless.

In other reading news, I read Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey which is a reworking of de Tocqueville's journey to the USA somewhere in the time of the French Revolution. It was great and reminded me yet again that I really must read Democracy in America (1835).

And now onto Cosmicomics that has finally come in for me from the library. Viva Calvino!