Fire from Heaven
Fire from Heaven is a 1969 historical novel by Mary Renault about the childhood and youth of Alexander the Great. It reportedly was a major inspiration for the Oliver Stone film Alexander.
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- Mary Renault. Fire From Heaven. I think she was ahead of the curve in recognizing that Alexander had monstrous qualities at a time when he was still seen as a kind of superhero.
Tolkein. The Silmarillion. I’ve bounced off this book a dozen times over decades, despite deeply enjoying The Hobbit and LoTR. This time I discovered that the best way to read it is backwards, tracing connections to characters you already know.
Stephenson. Anathem. I think I’ll skip the end next time. The first time I read it, I was confused; this time I understood exactly what was happening but I thought it was a bit pointless. Still worth it for the first 3/4 of the novel.
Lots of short stories. I was expecting to like Mark Twain better, but ours is a much more earnest era, and no match for his Gilded Age cynicism. What passes for cynicism today is Twain in his sunniest mood. At any rate, I appreciate Twain, but I enjoy EM Forster, Henry James, JG Ballard, William Gibson, and lots of others I’m forgetting at the moment.
- There were a lot of really interesting English social customs that are recorded from that Tudor/Stuart period. Between all the cuckolds horns, shrews, scolds, and conflicts between Catholics, Anglicans and the Puritan/Quaker/other protestant splinter groups, there's a lot of bizarre-seeming rituals that people undertook. Not to mention accusations of witchcraft.
One of the better books I read in my coursework on early modern England was Fire From Heaven, which covers a bunch of this stuff (http://amzn.to/1VzJn8r)
One I came across recently, reading one of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels was the practice of wife selling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_(English_custom))
- Mary Renault, a historian of Alexander, wrote a series of three historical novels about his life, starting with Fire from Heaven.
