Five favorite books you've (probably) never heard of

A couple of weeks back, fellow Carina author Veronica Scott challenged me to a Five Favorite Books meme. Since I find it all but impossible to narrow it down to just five for all time out of all the books I've ever read, I toyed with various ways to limit the list. Five Favorite Historical Romances. Five Favorite Non-Historical Romances. Five Favorite Classics. Five Favorite Kids' Books. Five Favorite Research Sources. Etc. (And now that I think about it, I can do just that for future posts, whenever I'm stuck for something to blog about. Win!)

But for this challenge I decided to do Five Favorite Books You've (Probably) Never Heard Of. OK, it's not like I'm the only literary omnivore out there, so you may have heard of some of them. But if anyone else out there has read and loved all these books, you're my long-lost sister or brother, and I want to compare libraries with you next time I'm stuck for what to read next.

1) In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden.

I'm a married Episcopalian romance novelist, so you wouldn't expect me to be the target market for a book about a woman who leaves behind a high-powered career (at least, by 1950's standards) in her 40's to become a Benedictine nun. But this is a gorgeously written book whose characters and their community spring to life on the page. I've re-read it more times than I can count, and I expect to go back to it again and again in the years to come.

2) The Jennie trilogy, by Elisabeth Ogilvie.

• Jennie, About to Be
• The World of Jennie G.
• Jennie Glenroy

This trilogy, sadly, is out-of-print and unavailable as e-books, but there seem to be plenty of affordable used copies on Amazon. I read and adored the first two books from my hometown library when I was in high school and later picked up the whole trilogy at a library book sale. 

If you like my books (and maybe you do, since you're reading my blog!), there's a good chance you'll like these, even though they're historical fiction with romantic elements rather than romance. They're Regency in time period but not in tone, the heroine is gentry rather than aristocratic, and the hero...well, I'm not going to give you spoilers! The first book is largely set in Scotland, and Scottish culture pervades all three. 

3) Wellington: The Years of the Sword, by Elizabeth Longford. 

My favorite Wellington biography. (Between being a military history geek and research I did for the alternative history that's my book-under-the-bed, I own several. I know. I'm quite aware what a big geek I am.) It's a beautifully written, human portrait of a fascinating man.

4) The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, by Donis Casey.

This one you can buy for your Kindle or Nook, and right now it's only $0.99 as an e-book! First in a mystery series set in rural Oklahoma in the early 20th century, with an amateur sleuth who's the mother of nine children on a farm. It sounds too unlikely to work, but IMHO it does. The voice is lovely, with lots of historical detail and texture.

5) Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, by Nathan Hale (and yes, that's his real name).

One Dead Spy

Big Bad Ironclad

Donner Dinner Party (available for preorder)

These fall into the select category of books Miss Fraser and I love equally, though at age 8 she's the one in their target market. They're graphic novels about American history, with the conceit that Nathan Hale (the spy one, not the author) as he's about to be hanged is taken up into a history book, where he sees what's to come for the new nation. With his newfound knowledge, he delays his execution by telling stories to his hangman and the British officer there to supervise. They're equal parts hilarious and historical. I'm not sure I'd recommend them if you don't have a kid (or niece, nephew, grandchild, etc.) to share them with, but if you do, buy them now.

196 years ago today

The Battle of Waterloo was 196 years ago today. As a Regency romance author who prefers to write about soldiers and also something of a military history geek, I think I'm contractually obligated to post something about the battle.

Four years from now, I plan to actually be there on the field for the 200th anniversary. I've got a decent-sized chunk of money set aside in a CD where I won't be tempted to touch it before it's time to book plane tickets, and I'm hoping to take 3-4 weeks off work and make a leisurely trip of it.



My new WIP is partially set at Waterloo, so I've been re-reading some of my sources. Today I was reminded by John Keegan in The Mask of Command that from the time Wellington woke up on June 15 (the day the French army crossed into Belgium) and when he fell asleep on the floor in his headquarters after Waterloo (having given his bed up to a dying officer), he got about 9 hours of sleep. Total. In three nights. Knowing that, I'm even more amazed and impressed with how well he and his army performed. On that little sleep, I'd have trouble framing a coherent sentence, and I'd probably botch the whole battle doing whatever is the military equivalent of getting a bowl of cereal, but putting the cereal box away in the fridge and the milk carton on the pantry shelf.

What's in a necronym?

I’ve read several biographies of the Duke of Wellington that begin by listing certain superficial commonalities he shared with his great adversary, Napoleon. Both were born in 1769. Both were the product of island dependencies of the nations they’re most associated with--Napoleon of course was Corsican, while Wellington was Anglo-Irish. I’ve never seen a biography that mentioned the fact both men were christened with sibling necronyms, however.

In other words, both were given the same name as a dead brother.

As a woman of the 21st century, I can’t imagine doing such a thing. If, God forbid, anything happened to Miss Fraser, it would feel like the height of cruelty to both daughters to give another baby the same name--as if my second daughter wasn’t her own unique person but a replacement for her lost sister, and as if my first child could ever be replaced.

Obviously the Earl and Countess of Mornington and Carlo and Letizia Buonaparte didn’t feel the same way when they were naming their new sons back in the summer of 1769. I don’t think that’s because the higher infant mortality of the 18th century had inured them to grief at the loss of the first Arthur and Napoleone. Parents of the era before vaccinations and antibiotics were undoubtedly less shocked to lose a child than we would be today, but letters and journals of the era show the deep sorrow of fathers and mothers at the loss of babies and young children. Instead I think 18th century parents thought of names differently than we do today.

When Mr. Fraser and I named our daughter, we thought primarily of her future and our aspirations for her to be a happy, successful individual. We picked a name we believed sounded both beautiful and dignified. We tested its dignity by plugging it into the presidential oath of office and imagining how it would sound in the sentence, “And the Nobel Prize for medicine goes to...” (Or to put it another way, to me a good girl’s name is one that would sound better on a POTUS than on the pole.) We kept the nod to tradition and family heritage in her middle name, which is a feminine form of her paternal grandfather’s name.

But in the past, names were more about family connections than expressing your dreams for your unique Special Snowflake of a baby. Wellington was named for his maternal grandfather. Knowing that, it makes much more sense that his parents reused the name. If you name your second son Arthur to show him, his grandfather, and all the world that the connection matters to you and you want the name to live on in the family, of course if that boy dies, you’ll give the name to the next son born, hoping he’ll be more fortunate and live to pass the name on to sons and grandsons of his own, keeping the great chain of connections and heritage alive.

At Romancing the Past...

Today I'm over on the Carina historical blog, talking about historical TMI, in the form of what I know about Wellington and Napoleon's sex lives that they probably wouldn't have particularly wanted to share with some random American woman born 200 years after them. Price of fame! Please stop by and comment.

Research Wednesday: A Story I'd Like to Learn

I am inordinately fond of the 1822 David Wilkie painting "Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch." It's so happy, you see. I don't think it's Great Art, but I find it impossible to look at without catching at least a tiny bit of the characters' jubilation. A quarter century of almost continual war is over at last, and even the dogs and the baby are thrilled.

Lately what catches my eye the most is the black man near the center of this detail from the painting:



He's there in the midst of the action, celebrating with the rest, and there's no hint I can see that he's relegated to any kind of lesser status. His features are possibly somewhat caricatured in that he's got a bit of a receding forehead, but so do some of the whites in the painting, so I'm inclined to give Wilkie a pass.

There were somewhere between 5000-10,000 blacks in London in the early 19th century, all of them free, and it stands to reason some of them must've been Napoleonic War veterans. There were also black soldiers on the French side. I recall reading that when the French army was in Egypt in the late 1790's and needed more manpower, one of the things they did was buy Sudanese slaves and offer them their freedom in exchange for military service--and that some of them fought in the Grande Armee for the duration of the wars.

There's a fascinating story waiting to be discovered...but I don't think I'm the one to write it. I'm not of the school that believes authors should be limited to their own ethnic groups for protagonists. But for someone like me who's not just white but eligible for the Daughters of the Confederacy (though I'd never DREAM of joining) to take it upon herself to tell the story of a black soldier under Napoleon or Wellington feels...presumptuous, to put it mildly. But somebody should do it.

That man in the painting and what I think he represents fascinate me so because I've been quietly following the discussions of the Confederacy, the Civil War, and their continuing repercussions in American society on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog. And one of the recurring topics is black soldiers--how black regiments were established in the Union army, what whites on both sides thought of them, debunking the false claim that substantial numbers of blacks fought for the Confederacy, and so on. Given the rampant racism of the time, there was considerable shock, even on the Union side, to discover that blacks made just as good soldiers as whites. Even though there were presumably plenty of Frenchmen and Englishmen still in living memory who wouldn't have been surprised in the least.

Random research ramblings

One of the story ideas I'm toying with attempting in the near- to medium-term future is a romance set around the Battle of Waterloo. You see, Waterloo is endlessly fascinating to me. I've got at least six books on the great battle packed away in boxes waiting for me to finish getting my new office ready, not to mention any number of biographies of Wellington and a few of Napoleon, too.



I never get tired of reading new accounts of Waterloo. If they're well-written, I read them with the same breathless, sleepless attention I give to the most page-turning and suspenseful of popular fiction, as if this time the British squares won't hold, the Guard won't falter, and the Prussians won't show up. So when browsing a newsstand the other day, I picked up a copy of a magazine I'd never tried before, Armchair General, whose June issue had the Scots Greys charging across the cover and the tantalizing headline of "Sun Tzu's Waterloo."

That's a different approach, thought I, and picked up the magazine, curious to see how the author had analyzed the battle from the perspective of a famous expert from another time and place.

Turns out people who've read as many books on Waterloo as I have probably shouldn't bother with magazine articles. The author concluded that Sun Tzu would've thought Napoleon's tactics extremely flawed on the day, and that though Wellington made some minor mistakes he'd chosen his position very well and defended it ably. Well, yeah. (And yes, there was more to it than that, but I didn't come away feeling I'd learned anything new or had my mind changed.)

The reason I'm blogging about this minor incident is that the article author stated with confidence that while Napoleon might've read Sun Tzu's Art of War, since there was a French translation available, Wellington most certainly had not, because no English translation existed in his lifetime.



Thing is, there's a slight problem with that logic that I as a Duke of Wellington fangirl spotted immediately: Wellington was fluent in French. Now, I have no reason to believe he ever read Sun Tzu, but as an aristocratic Englishman who was involved in international diplomacy (including a stint as ambassador to France), he wouldn't have needed to wait for an English translation.

Moral of the story? Don't trust everything you read.