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With some extreme exceptions (Harry Potter for one), I’m generally opposed to book “phenomenons.” If I see everyone reading it on the subway I like to flatter myself that I’m above it all. I tell myself that I read “real” books (which as any reader of this blog can see, is not entirely true). I hate when non readers tell me I *HAVE* to read such and such book. It irritates me. Worse yet are the books that are made into movies, causing an explosion of books into the population, mostly non readers.
The Twilight series is one of those phenomenons, tween girls are crazed about these books (and the subsequent movie). But it’s not just kids, plenty of young adult women have been trying to push the series on me. I successfully resisted, until one of my best reading friends literally put the stack in my hand and said, “Read them, they’re fun.”
I think it was the fact that she didn’t fly into rhapsodies about how amazing and impressive they were that made me take them from her. Still, they sat on my bookshelf. I had no intention of reading them, I figured I would just hold them for an appropriate amount of time and then return them with a disclaimer that I was “too busy” to get to them.
But what I didn’t count on was that my foray into British history was coming to an abrupt halt with Roy Jenkins’ Churchill. That book was painful; somehow he made Winston Churchill seem boring. I had to give up, only halfway through. It was disheartening, and I just didn’t have it in me to start anything even remotely challenging.
“They’re fun,” she had said, and so I reached for Twilight.
Katherine by Anya Seton is one of those books that is right up my alley. I first read it when I was in high school, before my Anglophilia went rampant. It was however, right at the perfect time when the romance part of this novel was best appreciated by my melodramatic teenage heart. It is the novelization of Katherine Swynford who, with her lover and eventual husband, John of Gaunt, are responsible for the majority of England’s (and Europe’s) royal families.
I hadn’t thought of this book in years, until I was in a store a few weeks back spending a gift certificate for my birthday. When I have “free” book money I tend to buy impulsively and wildly, getting things I wouldn’t spend my own money on. Katherine was sitting on a table and I wondered how it would read for an adult mind, so I snatched it up. Interestingly, I also picked up the new Alison Weir book, Mistress of the Monarchy, barely glancing at the title (I LOVE Ms. Weir!). I brought them both, in a stack with two other titles, to the register, I brought them both home, I put them both on the shelf.
It was only weeks later, when I finally picked up Katherine to read, I looked at what was underneath it and saw the subtitle of Mistress – The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster.
No one , certainly not the cashier, or anyone looking at my bookshelf, will believe it was unintentional, but it truly was. It’s funny how your mind keeps working even when you aren’t paying attention.
