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

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.

James wood liked wolf hall better

im reading ' a place of greater safety ' now -- her french revolution one and

yall

it

is

so

good

i dont want to read history anymore i just want to read hilary mantels historical novels. i want hilary mantel on the 30 yrs war

hilary mantel on the unification of italy

hilary mantels lenin

Gotta read these books

If someone wants to convince me what makes them so great in two sentences I might be inspired.

i can't imagine that anyone who is interested at all by the premise would fail to enjoy the wolf hall books

Too many years reading academic history books has made this kind of thing hard to get into, but I love the period.

its a better written version of a massive fantasy epic except the people are all real and the only magic is mastery of political intrigues

Well done!

lamp hardcore otm. i was hoping no one else had noticed. i have a developing idea for kind of ripping off the style of these books but applied to a different historical era and disguised in a more fantastical setting.

tom crom, space pirate

not really but that might actually be better

"better written" is of course u+k

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