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Everyone knows how I feel about Oprah books. And while I’d love to give myself the luxury of scrambling up on the soapbox and tearing down the woman for her choice of reading, I will at this moment gracefully decline to do so.
Do not, fair readers, fear that I have gone soft or that I have gained a holiday spirit during this festive time of year. No, I will refrain from an all out attack per se, but only because I have a very specific beef with Ms. Winfrey.
I first read Pillars of The Earth when I was about 14 or 15. I kept that battered mass paperback copy through college, many moves and life upheavals. I didn’t think about it until recently, when I heard that Mr. Follett wrote a sequel to it called World Without End (which I quickly bought) and I thought perhaps it warranted a re-read, particularly considering the roughly 15 years since I had last read it. I went in search of my dog eared mass paperback and alas I could not find it. I think it was collateral damage from our last and greatest move.
I’ve written before about how I develop ( oftentimes extreme) author crushes. Chabon and Maguire are two of the my biggest. They make me want to a be better writer (which is to say a good writer), they make me feel ashamed that I have never created the kind of sentences they do, seemingly effortlessly. I often stop and reread, particularly in Chabon’s case, a phrase that is a brain teaser, something you have to really sit and ponder before you really get it.
Suffice to say, I love these guys. I adore them. If I were a worshipful person, I might even deify them.
Which is why these two books were such a fist-in-the-gut disappointment.
If I were to create my idea of the perfect fantasy love child of, well, fantasy literature, I would take the best of Neil Gaimen and Clive Barker and meld them into one. I would stir gently the darker tones of Clive and fold them into the fluffy yet dense snarkiness and black humor of Neil. I would take the intimidating strength of Neil’s solid characters and plant them into Clive’s firmly rooted geography.
The result would likely be very much like this book.
Perhaps because I’m an atheist I can love stories about angels and demons without any of the resulting fear or guilt. It makes for great story telling that is endlessly entertaining, particularly if you aren’t worried about your immortal soul.
Though this book was described as bone chilling I found it mostly amusing and even in parts, affecting. Mr. B. Gone is a low class demon with a certain amount of charm. He directly threatens, cajoles and otherwise manipulates the reader, all in an attempt to get you to burn the book. In between such tirades he tells the story of how he came to be stuck in the book itself.
I finished Mr. B. Gone (I’ll get to that later) and needed a new book for today’s commute, so I picked up this one. I like nothing more than a good feud. Historical, epic feuds are best. And with Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots on the cover, how could I resist? Two of my favorites in the world of political cat fights.
Alas, I only made it only to page 7.
That’s right page 7 - wherein Mr. Colin Evans, the author of this book, said that Mary Queen of Scots was the daughter of James IV of Scotland and Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII.
I had to read it three times, each time more desperately trying to find the loophole. Some word or another that I’d missed that was changing the meaning of the sentence. Because, you see she was actually their granddaughter. Her parents were James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise (who was French). But no, the sentence was unfortunately very very wrong.
How does such a blatant, glaring, easily discovered, easily fixed error get into such book? Let alone STAY in such a book. Where are all the ever eager intern researchers? How did this slip through the cracks?
Unfortunately this is way beyond my tolerance level. Though I understand that not everyone is the Anglo-phile that I am. I know that most people in this country know all the American presidents instead of all the British monarchs from the Saxons to Elizabeth II. I know that I have a bit of an obsession. But that is beside the point because due to this blinding beacon of an error I now have no trust that the rest of his information is correct, which of course makes reading the book a useless endeavor.
Into the book swap at work it goes. Too bad, because it might have been interesting.
