itt WOLF HALL the book by hilary mantel and the upcoming hbo/bbc miniseries based on the same

ok bring up the bodies is in my possession

gotta finish this

i'm waiting for the new one to go into paperback

lagxxn tell me how it is

i wish theyd just put all books in paperback, hardcover is stupid

^^^^

ya i cant recall the last time i bought a hardcover but i could not wait

hardcovers are awesome yr both dummies

but they r so giant and expensive

impossible to read on the train

impossible to read because the words are so hard

hardcovers are great except when you move house twice in a month

Hardcovers are great for architecture, art, and history books. P much useless for contemporary fiction though.

that p much makes no sense

i like reading them on the train! paperbacks are too flimsy or perhaps i am just careless and rough but i like the reassuring weight of a hardcover novel in my bag as well, they are less fun to take on planes tho, too big.

i think 'bringing up the bodies' was really good but i always like the parts in stories where the hero has everything going p smoothly and is coming out on top and you can feel the sympathetic flush of success the defining sequence of the book i think is cromwell at home over christmas endlessly cajoling, directing, scheming, joking moving all these people into place with tireless good humor ceding his dead daughters wings to some other little girl, waiting

man i can't wait

the dialogue is just amazing in the first one. all his conversations with his sweet, dim (but not too dim) son are so funny and awkward

hardcovers of popular books very cheap thru' Amazon 2nd hand, got almost pristine Wolf Hall recently for <£3, will maybe read it come holiday.

that p much makes no sense

Why not? I like hardcover books when they have lots of gorgeous pictures to look at and are typically formatted larger, I don't think they are necessary for most fiction. But thats just my personal preference. FWIW, 98% of the fiction I read it in eBook format anyway.

gross

i think 'bringing up the bodies' was really good but i always like the parts in stories where the hero has everything going p smoothly and is coming out on top and you can feel the sympathetic flush of success

― Lamp, Tuesday, July 24, 2012 11:10 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol when more and gardiner where simultaneously marginalized i was so happy for him

i had a few physical correspondences that i couldn't shake

cromwell: al swearingen
anne: sasha grey
henry: tim tebow (older)

lmao oh no

yeah i know

ahhhhhhh hahahahaha

new one seem to be written in a somewhat simpler lighter mode, maybe to reflect cromwells ascension, or maybe by accident, or maybe im imagining it, anyway im gonna miss this guy when there are no more books left

my only complaint is it wasnt nearly as long as wolf hall

well maybe and the third one doesnt exist yet

i need a new book for traveling this weekend, is this it? is the writing really great?

yes

well maybe and the third one doesnt exist yet

haha when i finished 'bringing up the bodies' i immediately read the wikipedia summaries of any character i vaguely cared about

hah I have purposely not spolierized myself which is p lol for a historical novel

ok i'm about 1/4 through this and i'm all in.

damn I really want to read this now

mantel profile http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/15/121015fa_fact_macfarquhar?currentPage=all

Remarkable profile. Unusually bold style for the New Yorker.

and another booker prize

I'm actually reading APoGS with a book on the french revolution in the other hand, to clarify as i go.
― Jesu swept (ledge), Wednesday, June 6, 2012 4:10 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

doing the same w/wolf hall & wikipedia

this book is brilliant

paperback of sequel not due till april 2013 wtf /gettingaheadofmyself

i've had this on my 'list:read/sublist:probably won't read' for a while but based on the enthusiasm here i'm gonna bump it up.

is it historical fiction like the da vinci code or like the holocaust?

its a prequel to the davinci code

Oh FINE, I'll read this. (Also bumping to top of list based mostly on max's enthusiasm if I'm being completely honest.) Usually I don't like historical fiction because it always ends badly, because no one ever writes about all the nameless people of history who DIDN'T make terrible personal choices and therefore didn't make a bad end in a dark alley (or a tower courtyard). But OKAY, JEEZ.

can i read Bring Up The Bodies without reading Wolf Hall first?

you prob could, it does a bunch of recapping, but really its just the 2nd part of the same book, it picks up right where wolf hall left off and everything, recommend starting at the beginning

but i understand that it's much better than Wold Hall and i don't have the patience to read 1000 pages now..

lol who said that, crazy talk

i think maybe i liked wolf hall a lil better but really they are v v similar

reviews..
xpost

thanks for the tip anyway..

from my vantage point of being halfway thru the first book after picking it up yesterday i would say that "better" is relative to the point of irrelevance. this is excellent.

yeah didn't bother me or feel it was negative, just was interesting. i guess succession has a touch of this also tho in a diff way.

I rewatched the first series before starting this one and haven't noticed glaring stylistic changes but something I can't put my finger on feels a little different maybe

yeah same, basically. maybe the definition or something of it felt more modern, idk.

i dont know enough abt the relevant painters at all but i definitely felt there was a shift between "holbein as cheery character on set" in the first series and "holbein's mannerisms everywhere shaping the mise en scene" in the second (where by holbein i actually mean yes ALL of the court painters of the age, including all the othes one i don't know enough about etc) -- viz what constitutes naturalism in modern camera-based drama subtly supplanted by something more static and stylised, with (ok and now i'm off on one a bit) cromwell increasingly fighting to hold his place in such tableaux, which he too was collecting and paying for and encouraging? these are paintings designed to reflect an ORDER (mirror and light lol) and TC's presence increasingly manifests as a disorder, despite all his efforts (because of his efforts) to reshape society to absorb him comfortably -- until he is violently expelled, butcher's boy butchered blah blah

so i do agree that there's a visual shift between s1 and s2 but i'd have to rewatch to see if my theory which is mine does actually support this reading and you can too (tell me what you think in the comments)

The scene with the daughter as she looks at the tableaux was great ("The realm goes on")

Execution with no trial must be nice.

nice for whomst?

Was thinking it for Cromwell. He was toast, and didn't have to go through the motions of having his inferiors cross examine him in public.

He did have a trial of sorts I guess just not a public one.

I suppose this final EP bought home that I only really loved half of the season.

My issue in the main is that Cromwell is as much of a monster as all the rest of them. That he was our future is not a consolation (especially as we live in this present) so making up a daughter (from the wiki there are records but its not entirely clear we have anything like its being presented), and especially this potential drama of what could've been in his head over whether he betrayed Wolsey, the stuff with Dorothea which plays into that as well...I just don't buy the humanizing of this man, feels overegged. Which is why I quite liked that he threw a few punches, even if it was him losing power it was an acknowledgment that this is what he was. Even if he could write a sweet legal document that did things.

So the last EP was really strong because you get to see Cromwell as what he is best at, which was manoeuvering around, but also facing up to his less clever but (by birth, class, all the shit that we are living with to this day) less able superiors (though Spall's one note performance makes sense in the last words to Cromwell, they were a bunch of gangsters, and that's who we are ruled by). As Cromwell points out they use the tricks he devised to execute him.

On the flip side it gives Mark Rylance plenty to work with and the execution is exemplary. There are strong scenes throughout the season, even if I'd edit out 1-2 EPs worth.

But I haven't read the Mantel books. Would be up for reading the first one, for sure.

Also I liked the actor who played Gardiner quite a bit. Pure slime of a man.

As I understand it, he probably did have a daughter outside of marriage, but Mantel created the character of Jenneke. I’m sure I read a note about why but can’t for the life of me find it.

guy who played Gardiner also played the hanging-out-with-the-nazis-during-ww2 Windsor in the netflix series, and was also very impressively vile in that role. I'm going to watch S2 again because I didn't follow all of this season that well, especially the early eps, and missed a lot of the subtle undercurrents that weren't being telegraphed. I only ever read the first book, so am more informed by history than fiction going into this one. I find it fascinating/amusing that characters like Richie Rich were Cromwell creatures who seemingly owed him everything for the fortunes and status they had acquired and they sold him out *just like that*.

i beg anyone itt who has only read book 1 but has watched the whole series: definitely do take the timr to read books 2 and 3 if you can. they add a lot of depth to what is set up about TC in book 1, and explain more of the undercurrents & internal narratives that are glanced at in the show.

i think my main critique of season 2 is how much you lose of cromwell without access to his internal narratives - the way she writes TC’s execution is so much more emotionally devastating bc it’s from his pov

imo

Written in early pandemic https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mysterious-sweating-sickness-in-hilary-mantels-wolf-hall-trilogy-and-the-private-country-of-illness

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/25/mark-rylance-took-significant-pay-cut-to-get-wolf-hall-made-director-tells-mps

On PBS now, either to binge on Passport or watch once a week over the air like yr. grans did with “Upstairs, Downstairs”.

I’m binging of course. Some thoughts:

—regarding the different look to S2 discussed above, Shrewsbury Abbey is definitely recreated by CGI, at least when TC and the abbess are talking in that cloister—something very uncanny valley about it.

—miss a consistently used foil throughout the series like Foy’s Anne. She was perfect.

—the continuing mystery of why Cromwell didn’t remarry after his wife died. For the time, that was very unusual I understand. Im only in episode 3 of series 2 but the books never get onto that either— while we are privileged to many of his other thoughts Mantel makes no effort to explain why he didn’t. It would have saved him some trouble! Was Dorothea his only plan? Dude had plenty of other ladies on the boil for him (the show doesn’t really get into but the last book in particular has a poor widow —which he gives away to Richard—and another courtier as being portrayed as probably willing to be asked).

lol i got super-excited bcz my mum's parents lived like 40 yards from shrewsbury abbey and i know it quite well and couldn't believe i'd missed the chance to re-connect (the present-day building is easily old enough but it has no surviving cloisters and it's built of red sandstone)

however it's actually shaftsbury abbey -- which is a ruin today and so i guess had to be CGI'd?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3w10816en3o

Peter Kosminsky told BBC Two's Newsnight they eventually opted to axe costly exterior scenes in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light, meaning almost everything in the Tudor drama, screened by the BBC, became "conversations in rooms" instead.

Shaftesbury not Shrewsbury, shit.

Too much soprano keening on the soundtrack, too many dreams of Dorothea, etc. all told the second series was pretty satisfying if dumbed down a little bit. Wished the beheading scene had more of his abstract stream of consciousness that the book had but I’m sure that’s tough to portray on TV.

Surely there were less ridiculous ways than showing the Archbishop in the crowd ...

Yeah that was disappointing

Calzino, based on what you said about Richard Rich above, you might like this from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Cromwell biography: “Few historical accounts have managed to make the tale of Rich’s career anything better than despicable in its opportunism and chameleon like profession of religious belief”

he was just basically very .. English I guess.. lol