What is this human thing you call ... sleep?

[lizbee]

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*

Comments

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of more interested in the supposed friendship Anna and Henry later developed.

Anna seems to me, to be crying out for a 'spunky lesbian heroine' historical novel. Although maybe she was just asexual or just 'not that into him'.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of more interested in the supposed friendship Anna and Henry later developed.

I imagine it was profoundly awkward. He was quite pissed off when there was a rumour (while he was married to Katherine Howard) that he'd impregnated Anne.

Anna seems to me, to be crying out for a 'spunky lesbian heroine' historical novel.

In a lot of ways she seems to naive to be convincing, but at the same time ... hmmm.

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

How dumb could she REALLY have been? She's the only one of them who escaped, and got off pretty brilliantly.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

And without benefit of much education and no worldly experience whatsoever, too. *loves her a bit* But that doesn't change the fact that she was, by all accounts, deeply naive about sex.

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

True. Hmm. She also doesn't outlast Mary, so you can't really have her as Elizabeth's crazy mystery solving auntie.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

And there were no zany adventures under Mary.

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

Mary was srs bizness.

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

Of course, now I want to see a series about Anne of Cleves FIGHTING CRIME in the later years of Henry's reign.

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

It just bums me out that the years don't work out, because Anne of Cleves Miss Marpling the death of Robert Dudley's wife would be an epic story.

Nnngh.