Yes, thanks, as I wrote upthread, I really enjoyed A Gentleman (although I was unconvinced by the ending).
Sorry, I didn’t read the whole thread carefully. Re the ending-- the story was pretty unlikely (that’s why it’s called fiction), and I like a happy-ish ending more often than not, even if unconvincing. The members of my book club are so resistant to being thought of as chick-lit-fans that they push for gritty realism and books with endings as grim as real life. That gets old. So does Real Life, for that matter.
Reading Civility hoping for something as good as Gentleman would be a disappointment.
Good to know - thanks for the tip, ThelmaLou.
And I don’t mind a happy ending, not in the least - some of my favorite books have happy endings. But a happy ending has to make sense if I’m to read it and then close the book with satisfaction. And that happy ending, in that place and time, just didn’t IMHO.
Finished Say No to Murder , by Nancy Pickard, which I enjoyed. I’d read several books in the series back in the 1990’s, but somehow missed this one.
Now I’m reading Castle of the Eagles: Escape from Mussolini’s Colditz, by Mark Felton. It’s about the escape of a group of British POW’s in 1943.
Finished The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors, by Dan Jones. Very good. Jones writes well and makes sense out of a very confusing, complex time.
I like how the Tudor line got started to begin with, by a lowly Welshman named Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur. The English were unable to pronounce his tortured Celtic name and after several versions finally settled on the pronunciation and spelling of Owen Tudor. He had made his way to the royal court of Henry V, of Battle of Agincourt fame, had participated in the French wars and served in the royal household in some obscure capacity. When Henry V died, he left behind a 20-year-old widow, Catherine de Valois, youngest daughter of the mad king of France and whose sexual appetites were notorious. She started a dalliance with a nobleman, sparking fears that a remarriage might empower him, or any other, to an unacceptable degree. So a law was passed by parliament forbidding a dowager queen to remarry without the express consent of a ruling adult king. (The new king, her son Henry VI, was just a tyke.) Violating this law was punishable by forfeiture of the nobleman groom’s lands and tenements for life. So she then somehow met and took up with Owen Tudor, who was presumably very good in the sack. Being a lowly Welshman, he had nothing to lose but also was not perceived as a threat. The two were allowed to marry. (Significantly, parliament eventually granted Tudor all the rights of an Englishman, this at a time when Welshmen had no legal rights whatsoever. He still ended up being beheaded amid the endless civil wars of the 15th century.) One of their sons married a direct descendant of the 14th century’s Edward III, thus giving their son Henry VII his blood claim to the throne, which he won in the Wars of the Roses’ final battle at Bosworth in 1485. After him came Henry VIII, and the Tudor dynasty was firmly ensconced.
This book was Jones’ follow-up to his equally excellent The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England. He started that book with an account of the drunken shipwreck in 1120 that killed England’s Crown Prince, William the Aetheling (William the Conqueror’s grandson), along with a couple hundred others of the English and Norman elite. This completely avoidable disaster left Henry I without an heir, sparking a couple decades of civil war out of which Henry II emerged to found the Plantagenet dynasty. I keep thinking about how this one shipwreck changed the entire course of history. If the young William had lived to become king, there would have been no Plantagenet dynasty, no King John, no Magna Carta, no Henry VIII, no Queen Elizabeth, indeed no George III against whom American colonists would rebel. A good number of Shakespeare’s plays would never have been written. All because a prince, all his guests and the entire crew were drunk as skunks one night and set out in a storm they should have known better not to. The mind boggles. This world might be completely unrecognizable.
Next up, it’s back to LA noir with A Dangerous Man, by Robert Crais, the last of his novels that I have yet to read.
Interesting - sounds like the premise of a good alternative history novel, Siam.
Having really enjoyed his Sherlock Holmes pastiche The House of Silk, I’ve now begun an audiobook of Anthony Horowitz’s semi-sequel, Moriarty. It begins soon after Holmes’s supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls in 1891. I like it so far, although the actor reading it isn’t all that good at accents.
Just to mention, Dan Jones served as a technical consultant to George RR Martin on Game of Thrones, which to some extent was based on the Wars of the Roses.
Regarding your comments about William the Aetheling’s death: Some time ago I read Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter: The Remarkable True Story Of American Heroine Ida Lewis, by Lenore Skomal. Lewis was a full time lighthouse keeper for most of her life, saving at least nineteen people, plus one sheep, at great risk to her own life. Most of these who needed rescuing did so because they got drunk and took out a boat in stormy weather, often after stealing the boat first. (The rest got drunk and went out on too-thin ice.)
Finished Castle of the Eagles: Escape from Mussolini’s Colditz , by Mark Felton, which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in WWII or just in fascinating history. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.
Now I’m reading The Dispatcher, a fantasy novella by John Scalzi.
Finished Wendy, Darling. It was just okay. I was interested in the story but the pacing drove me nuts. Plus, the answer to the mystery was unsatisfying, and
We never found out what happened to Hook!
I started The Gates by John Connolly but gave up a few chapters in. It’s a Halloween book with an eleven-year old boy as the main character. I had previously read and greatly enjoyed Connolly’s book The Book of Lost Things, which featured a twelve-year old but really read like an adult book, so I had high hopes for The Gates. Unfortunately, The Gates actually seems to be written for a younger audience, so once I realized that I stopped reading and returned it for a refund. Seems like it might be a good book for a younger audience, though.
Then I read the short story The Evidence of the Affair, about a woman who discovers love letters from another woman in her husband’s briefcase, and decides to get in touch with the mistress’s husband. It was good, you see the storyline going in a certain direction, but then there’s a surprise ending. It kept me engrossed from start to finish.
Last night I started on Majesty, the sequel to American Royals, which is also classified as young adult. The main characters are college-aged, and the book centers around the various relationships between the main characters: romances, friendships, and family. It’s a nice change of pace for me – I feel like I’ve been reading a lot of thrillers and mysteries lately, and to be perfectly honest, I’m getting rather tired of reading about murder as a plot device, so I’m hoping this book will scratch my current literary itch.
Finished The Dispatcher , a fantasy novella by John Scalzi, which was okay.
Now I’m reading Building Big, by David Macaulay, which is a companion to the 2000 PBS series of the same name about the construction of famous skyscrapers, bridges, dams, etc.
That was my reaction as well. I didn’t not like it but I wasn’t wildly in love with it.
Started yesterday on The Nesting by C.J. Cooke, about a girl who poses as a nanny in order to take a job in Norway, watching the two young children of an architect who is building a dream house on the site of his wife’s suicide. But something doesn’t want them there…
Finished Building Big, by David Macaulay, which is a companion to the 2000 PBS series of the same name about the construction of famous skyscrapers, bridges, dams, etc. This was very interesting, and gave me a new appreciation for the work that goes into construction, architecture, and civil engineering.
This book was published in 2001, not long before 9/11. The World Trade Center is included in the section on skyscrapers. 
Now I’m reading The Watsons Go to Birmingham–1963, by Christopher Paul Curtis.
I’m a big Macaulay fan. Earlier this year I revisited his books on the Empire State Building, a Roman town, a European cathedral and an Egyptian pyramid. I also enjoyed his much more recent book Crossing on Time, which is about ocean travel over the years, and focuses on the building of the last great American passenger liner, the SS United States.
Finished The Watsons Go to Birmingham–1963 , by Christopher Paul Curtis, which is good.
Now I’m reading The Moth Presents: All These Wonders–True Stories About Facing the Unknown, edited by Catherine Burns.
Finished reading this today. An excellent, well-written novel. As @ThelmaLou indicated, while reading the last several chapters it was impossible to put down.
The book is also a really good insight into the doings at Bletchley Park during WWII.
I confess it was on like my fourth reading of this, with a third grade book club, that a kid casually clued me in to what the “Wool Pooh” monster actually was, and I felt like a great big idiot.
Strangely, Watsons Go to Birmingham is one of Curtis’s least hardcore children’s books. Dude does not mess around.
I’m about fifty pages into Mary Jane by Jessica Blau. The premise of this book is great (sheltered teen girl spends the summer hanging out with the kooky neighbor family and their famous friends, has mind blown); I love the cover; but dang. So far it’s been like reading a less edgy Judy Blume book. I’ll give it a little more time.
Forgot to say, I finished The Nesting. It was kind of a mess. It’s billed as a supernatural thriller, but to me it was tedious descriptions of child care for the most part. Then there was a ghost, or was it a monster, and somebody killed the first wife but what with mysterious diaries and dream hallucinations and whatnot, in the end, I didn’t care.