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

[lizbee.livejournal.com]

No, Weir went from arguing that Boleyn had come out of the French court virgo intacta, to saying (with total assurance) that she was the court bicycle.

*goes to fix sentence*

[mediumajaxwench.livejournal.com]

It's been a few years since I read it but I thought that Weir's point throughout was that Boleyn was the court bicycle in france, but that she never actually engaged in vaginal sex there. So she was still technically a virgin until she gave in to Henry but she was also a bit more experienced that she had let him believe. Of course, I may just be remembering her argument from the last chapter.