My battle with 'Wolf Hall': is it worth persevering?
If you follow Reading Matters on Facebook, you will know I "accidentally" started reading Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall
on Tuesday. I say "accidentally" because I had no real intention of reading it, but I had cycled to work and forgotten to bring a book with me for my lunch-time read.
Thank goodness for my iPhone. I have the Kindle app, which lets me access my Kindle library, so I'll never be caught out without a book ever again. Two minutes later I downloaded Wolf Hall, which I bought two years ago, and began reading it over my Chinese rice.
But three days later I'm afraid it's not going well. I've reached page 143, but I'm not really enjoying it. I don't have a very good grasp of English history, so I'm finding all the characters confusing (there are far too many characters named Thomas, for a start) and perhaps it doesn't help that I've had an intense week subbing copy so don't have much bandwidth for concentrating on complicated storylines.
This evening I turned to the people of Twitter, but I'm not sure it's helped...
What say you? Have you read "Wolf Hall"? Is it worth persevering?
Comments
My battle with 'Wolf Hall': is it worth persevering?
If you follow Reading Matters on Facebook, you will know I "accidentally" started reading Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall
on Tuesday. I say "accidentally" because I had no real intention of reading it, but I had cycled to work and forgotten to bring a book with me for my lunch-time read.
Thank goodness for my iPhone. I have the Kindle app, which lets me access my Kindle library, so I'll never be caught out without a book ever again. Two minutes later I downloaded Wolf Hall, which I bought two years ago, and began reading it over my Chinese rice.
But three days later I'm afraid it's not going well. I've reached page 143, but I'm not really enjoying it. I don't have a very good grasp of English history, so I'm finding all the characters confusing (there are far too many characters named Thomas, for a start) and perhaps it doesn't help that I've had an intense week subbing copy so don't have much bandwidth for concentrating on complicated storylines.
This evening I turned to the people of Twitter, but I'm not sure it's helped...
What say you? Have you read "Wolf Hall"? Is it worth persevering?
Welcome
Reading Matters features hundreds of book reviews of mainly modern and contemporary literary fiction, with a special focus on novels from Australia and Ireland, and occasional forays into crime, true crime, translated fiction, narrative non-fiction and memoirs.
Your host is Kim Forrester, otherwise known as kimbofo, who has been blogging about books since 2001.
Editorial policy
Books featured on Reading Matters are from kimbofo's personal collection -- unless otherwise stated.
