How Does Varina Compare To Other Historical Novels?

Drinking sips of coffee while reading through the thread. You guys have given me so many more books to add to my TBR. My wallet is hurting right now. I think I'll just start with the one that has the prettiest cover for now. Judge me.

Gibson’s The Peripheral is rather like watching a super painter switch from working in oil to watercolor. Compared to the tech-orientation of Count Zero and Idoru, The Peripheral is more concerned with the consequences of technology. The novel’s two time streams enable Gibson to explore the cause and effect of given events in a way that his earlier novels were not able to. And the greater, more systemically realized villainy is very pleasing. The new novel’s heroine, Flynne, is cool, but not as cool as Case or Bobby Newmark. However, the way Gibson brings rural poverty into his high-tech cyberpunk world is brilliant. It’s rather like Hillbilly Elegy as cyberpunk.

The Gemma Doyle Trilogy by Libba Bray is another amazing YA novel that is good for adults too. It’s a historical fantasy mystery that takes place in 1895 and Gemma Doyle is a rebellious young girl fighting her visions, a mysterious magical order, and the strict rules of her boarding school. There’s a mystery surrounding Gemma’s mother’s death, a mysterious diary, and a hidden magical realm that Gemma must find. Gemma is an intuitive and powerful young girl who must fight against the repressive Victorian society around her, including the mundane and magical restrictions placed upon her. Bray looks at the topic of female desire and the bonds of friendship and the struggle to find power in these novels. I thoroughly enjoyed The Gemma Doyle Trilogy and found the setting of Spence Academy in the late 1800s to be claustrophobic and perfect for a Gothic style of mystery. As a main character, Gemma isn’t always likable, but you can’t help but root for her because she is so passionate and determined. I think what makes Gemma the strongest character in the trilogy is her friendships with her girls and how together they are able to push up against the boundaries set upon them in order to discover themselves and their place in the world.

The Movie adaptation removed a lot of the book's 1990s culture to make the book last longer. The Movie only kept the social hierarchies in High School, the cliques and the pressure to fit in. The rest of the book's culture is very specific to the 1990s with payphones and alot of slang. The Movie takes the emotions, the loneliness and the feeling to be heard and makes them timeless. The book is also very timeless in its themes but it is a strong product of the 1990s. The film has a classic quality. Even though the story is about a teenager, it is relatable. Today’s teenager can easily see themselves in Melinda’s situation even though the technology is different. The book is similar in that it is timeless, but it is also a more of a period piece in terms of details. The adaptation has to make choices about what to keep and what to update to make sure the heart and soul of the story is still accessible. In this case, it was smart to keep the core of the story and smooth out the details that would give away the time period in a visual adaptation meant for a general audience.

One of the most satisfying historical romances to read is one that defies most expectations of the genre. Courtney Milan’s The Duke Who Didn’t is a Regency romance about a Chinese-British duke who falls for a woman from a Hakka village in rural England. The woman makes sauce for a living. The book is joyful and funny and treats with depth the realities of being a person of color in 19th century England without letting that become too depressing for the romance at hand. The historical research about Hakka communities in England is great and very fresh. The novel follows the long-held crush of a man on a woman. He secretly identifies with her, and they share a common cultural heritage. It is a very warm, clever, and deeply romantic novel, which explores in a thoughtful manner the history of a people of color in a bygone era. In short, a perfect escape read that is also very perceptive.

There are some VERY nasty villains in this book. William Hamleigh is so detestable I dislike him intensely, though he is probably not a totally historically accurate and nuanced villain. A totally historically accurate and nuanced villain might be slightly more realistic, but I doubt I would be as indignant at the plight of the serfs if I were reading a historically accurate novel of life in the 12th century. As it is, I am able to feel the outrage of Follett’s corrupt lord, his evil bishop, and his cunning spy, because I care about the sufferers under their oppression. The historical accuracy of the novel lies not in the psychologically realistic portrayal of the oppressors, but in the emotional truth of their oppressive regime.

I’ve found Kobo to be particularly compelling in a number of key ways. Unlike the Amazon Kindle ecosystem, Kobo doesn’t feel like a walled garden, and supports EPUB files out of the box, so you can load up your e-reader with books from other stores, or download e-books from your local library. Many titles on Kobo are offered without Digital Rights Management (DRM), meaning you actually get to own the books you buy. Kobo’s e-readers are sleek, minimalist affairs, designed to facilitate reading above all else. They offer warm front lights for reading in bed, and waterproof covers for poolside reading, for example. Finally, the book recommendations on the Kobo store are less driven by algorithms than those found on Amazon Kindle, and tend to include more indie titles, and more translated works – helping to support a more diverse range of authors and publishers. However, Kobo are lacking in social features and audiobooks. I found Goodreads integration terrible compared to Kindle’s. Kobo also seems to not consider manga and comic books when they are stocking their online store. BookWalker is far superior for those types of books. And while they don’t have a subscription service like Kindle Unlimited, Kobo has partnered with local libraries for OverDrive access to e-books. For serious readers who want the most flexibility to read the books they want, with the best design for reading books on e-readers, Kobo are a quietly brilliant choice. The lack of ads is wonderful, and the stats to track your reading are just the right amount of nerdy.

I feel like my brain has been rearranged every time I picked up a book, but that’s what I got from ‘Vagabond’. Although it’s often paired with ‘Berserk’ due to its dark tone, the two series are quite different. While the fight scenes in ‘Berserk’ are against supernatural enemies, Musashi’s battles are against his own ego. All the fight scenes in ‘Vagabond’ are very realistic, no flare-ups of supernatural power. Even the tiniest of battles feel tense and you feel the extent of the defeat and the growth the winner experienced. In contrast to the vast landscape of ‘Vinland Saga’, ‘Vagabond’ takes place on a very tight focus, making each win hollow and every loss life-changing. It’s just as good, in a completely different way.

Another indirect source of book literature are book blogging communities. Many book bloggers receive advance review copies (ARCs) of upcoming releases. The bloggers then review the books within a set time frame and after that, they often host a giveaway for the physical or e-book copy. So, by following your favorite historical romance book bloggers on Twitter or on Instagram, you can get entered for the giveaways of newly released books by authors whose books the blogger seems to like. Not as easy as going to a library and checking out a book on the spot, but very fun to win a newly released book by a favorite author and to discover a new blogger with similar tastes.

Oh, the novels of Renaissance romance are just so beautifully, magically crafted to contain so much passion and politics and poetry. One of my absolute favorites of all time has to be The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, which, yes, is rather outside the mainstream of typical romance novels in being very dark indeed. Yet it is such an utterly fascinating and so very intense novel, and this particularly in terms of its exploration of the power of love. Written as it was by a playwright (of another epoch), the novel offers a powerful sense of drama, and remains as forceful and as moving as ever. As for arcadian romance, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit by John Lyly is another absolute treasure, above all for the dialogues which are so full of wit and of sparkle. For a more grounded exploration of the tortured conflicting feelings of love, however, it would be hard to think of anything better than Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney. The rather cardboard characters in this sprawling, rather idealized novel of a half-dozen or so love stories all involving rather knight-like shepherds are so beautifully and imperiously mapped out against the backdrop of a completely fictional idyllic rural context, with all their conversations consisting of the sharpest and wisest repartee, and their glances at each other swimming with hidden meanings. Another different approach to the romance novel of the Renaissance era is found in ‘Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit’ by John Lyly. Most readers would consider it to be outside the genre of romance yet there are many great dialogues regarding the complexities of love and friendship. For something totally different, maybe one of the most celebrated poems of the Renaissance era would be ‘The Faerie Queene’ by Edmund Spenser. Written as an allegorical romance featuring knights, damsels, enさ chantresses and fantastical quests, it is a magnificent read with lots of romance woven throughout the very moral tales of the imaginary land of Faerie. Yes, it is written in a very rich and dense language but after a while you can fall into its rhythm and be transported by a mighty wave of beautiful poetry. I love Renaissance romances, including their imperfections. The great love stories of the past are not as neat as modern tales with happy endings. Rather, they are fraught with the agony and politics of love and contain many unpredictable human interactions. Every time I return to a book I have read before, I discover something new about the human experience and the time period in which the author lived.