lizbee | What is this human thing you call ... sleep? (Reply)

I don't know why I'm so tired, but I slept for eleven hours last night, and now I feel like a nap between breakfast and lunch would be quite nice. And my cold is still hanging around; it's not debilitating, but it's frustrating to wake up every morning with a dry cough and a throat so sore my voice is gone.

I am feeling faintly annoyed, because I bought a new book on Henry VIII, The Last Days of Henry VIII, and it is not entirely satisfying. It's not as frustrating, so far, as Alison Weir's biography of the queens -- which is quite good, except for all the sources she doesn't cite, and the sexism she adopts in the chapters about Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, and the weird contradictions like how, at the same time that Henry decides Anne B. wasn't a virgin when she become involved with him, Weir comes to the same conclusion, despite having argued otherwise a few chapters back.

Anyway, this other book seems marginally stronger on the history, but has weird prejudices of its own. Like a peculiar obsession with Henry's obesity. Yes, he was grotesquely fat, but it's not actually that relevant to the executions he was authorising. Also, I don't actually think Anne of Cleves spent even thirty seconds pining for Henry. By all accounts, she had a long (by the standards of the era) and contented life of singledom, and should be held up as a role model for romantically uninclined women everywhere.

I really need a Tudors icon that I didn't nick from Showtime. *opens Photoshop*