Kindle-cita

(Big news over the holidays was that Santa brought me a Kindle. So now you may have to endure various photos of Mommy's wittle Kindle-windle in many cute poses. )

I have one small gripe with the Kindle other than the enormous one that IT IS NOT A BOOK and that is: it has no backlighting and on a dark plane flight the Kindle is as dark as a book. So in the one slim instance where the Kindle might actually trounce the book it sadly falls short.

But on to what was on the Kindle's screen for some of the holidays. I read Juliet, Naked on it and Wolf's Hall.

Wolf's Hall was surprise for me. It was  historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell who for a time was Henry VIII's closest advisor. It was very engaging from the begining and the writing was very intimate and immediate without being romanticized. Hillary Mantel apparently was trying to put a better spin on Cromwell's character than history and the Cromwell she depicts is almost like a girl he's so sensitive and likable. I wonder about that since when I wiki-ed old Cromwell's ass (easy to do right from the Kindle btw) he was actually spending a lot of time boiling the heads of his enemies and putting them on spikes. Ah mere details in the way of the fiction!

She had a very odd use of pronouns, the very intimacy of the story with Cromwell called merely "he" backfires on her somewhat.  When there are many possible 'he's' in a scene and you get confused you wish she's call them by their actual names. Then suddenly she uses a 'we' and you're really confused.

But other than that it was a pretty solid read and  she quite enjoyed it.