[quote=""Celia Hayes""]I wanted to like Larry McMurtry, especially "Lonesome Dove" and the sequels/prequels. There are reviewers and fans who keep comparing my books to those of his (mostly, I assume because both mine and his are set in mid 19th century Texas) and I tried my very best to slog through them, but I just couldn't. Too many improbablities, and too much tweaking of actual historical fact.[/quote]
You too? I jettisoned LD after the snake scene in the river -- I HATE snakes, having lived in rattlesnake country for a long time. It rather poisoned my attempts to read HF in American settings.
(Completely unrelated bit: Listening to WQXR now, and they've been featuring a cd called Tudor City. Pretty cool music, I must say!)
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Authors you wanted to like, but didnt
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Margaret
- Bibliomaniac
- Posts: 2440
- Joined: August 2008
- Interest in HF: I can't answer this in 100 characters. Sorry.
- Favourite HF book: Checkmate, the final novel in the Lymond series
- Preferred HF: Literary novels. Late medieval and Renaissance.
- Location: Catskill, New York, USA
- Contact:
That's an interesting theory. It's true that literacy is a phenomenon that arose late in human evolution. And it's only been quite recently in history that societies have emerged in which literacy is the norm rather than the rare exception. Of course, reading isn't the only activity that requires a contemplative sort of focus. Buddhist monks have been meditating for centuries, if not millennia, and I'll bet shamans have been doing it as long as there have been humans.One thing he said that I'm not sure about, though, is that humans are hard-wired to be constantly responding to distractions. He says the x-number of decades where we led a more contemplative existence was an aberration, really, and that we are now reverting back to our more natural state.
In any case, I'm not giving up my computer. They'll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands!
Browse over 5000 historical novel listings (probably well over 5000 by now, but I haven't re-counted lately) and over 700 reviews at www.HistoricalNovels.info
I'll have to add to my list, Gwen Bristow. I really, really wanted to like her books because she has written about topics that are highly interesting to me: old San Francisco, old Los Angeles and the Revolutionary War. However, I tried two of her books and just couldn't make it past the first few pages. I think if I had read her as a teenager or young adult I might have loved her. But as an adult, her style just doesn't work for me.