thelittledog | The Great Genre Reading Challenge: Medieval History (Reply)

The History: Medieval book took a while to choose, as we couldn't find one that looked like we'd want to read. Finally we decided The Greatest Knight, by Elizabeth Chadwick looked like a good compromise. Then I had to wait for a copy to come available at the library, then finish the book I was already reading, and by the TGK had to go back to the library because someone else wanted, so I bought a cheap copy and waited for that to arrive. Gah.

And after all that... it starts with the MC asleep, dreaming, about himself as a child. Yeah. So the first three chapters are episodes in the life of the MC. Maybe the whole book is like that, or maybe it gets more of a connected narrative, I don't know because I stopped reading after the third chapter. If I want episodic life histories, I'll read a biography, and that way I can skip the lists of what they eating and other lovely created descriptions that did nothing to evoke a sense of the place to me. The only thing it evoked was the feeling that the author had done a lot of research and wanted to include all these lovely details. (Historical fiction usually makes me feel like that, this is why I Don't Like It.)

I'm sure it's a very good book if you like fictionalised account of famous people with lots of visual details. I don't, and this seems to be what Medieval History book seem to be about, or war, or both. This is why it took us so long to find one to read :)