Some Gentle Readers may have been wondering whether I have given up the Book Reports. Some Gentle Readers may actually have been hoping that I had given up the Book Reports, I suppose. In fact, Your Humble Blogger hasn't been reading much, for a variety of reasons. In addition to not spending very much time reading, I have started three or four books and given them up as bad jobs, and spent many many hours reading one particular book that I might well finish someday. Maybe. Only one hundred and thirty pages to go.
Anyway, even with my (bad) habit of reading two or three books at once (well, not at once, obviously, but over the same period of days, or an overlapping period, at any rate, often finishing one-look, I'll start again.
Anyway, the unfinished books notwithstanding, Your Humble Blogger has managed finally to complete his first book of 2007-hurrah for me! But it was a reread-derision for me! But it was instructive historical novel-hurrah for me! But it was full of inaccuracies-derision for me! But I bought it for a quarter from a church fair-hurrah for me! But it fell apart when I was reading it-derision for me! But I bought the sequel for another quarter-hurrah for me! But the sequel stinks-derision for me!
Hm. Perhaps I should give up these book reports, after all. Anyway, I, Claudius was pretty much exactly as I remembered it, with only my increased knowledge of the actual history interfering with my enjoyment of it as it was. Well, and the sex and violence is pretty tame by modern standards. At least it kept my mind off the current political scene, because the book totally fails to evoke any current events, being about the slow slide of a once-powerful nation into disrepute and disaster, as the Senate grows increasingly servile and the Executive increasingly authoritarian, uninterested in actually governing and disconnected from reality.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.