Karen > Recent Status Updates

Elegies: In Memoriam, Cantos LXXXI - XC
Favorite line comes from Canto LXXXIX -

“He brought an eye for all he saw”

Father Yarvi…plain Yarvi of yore… but still the sarcastic witty biting tongue from the first book.
He is Yoda❣️❣️❣️
Maybe Rulf is Solo🥰🤣

My favorite quote from this book (Chapter 25, Who Is This Great Lord, page 287)
“To keep morale high and dehydration low, he [Henry V] also sends to London for fine wines and one thousand pipes* of ale and beer.”

The footnote says (in true Dan Jones tongue-in-cheek manner):
“*Roughly half a million pints. The English have earned their reputation as enthusiastic beer drinkers over many centuries.”💕👍

Elegies: In Memoriam, Cantos LXXI - LXXX
Favorite line is the final one from Canto LXXX

“Reach out dead hands to comfort me.”

“He didn’t feel like he was standing in the light at all.”
End of chapter titled In The Shadows.
I said in review of the first book in The Shattered Sea trilogy that it offered “promises” and I wanted to experience more.
Already banking on this choice to move on to the second book.
The “he” referenced is named Brand.
I already like Brand.

Lots of people. Maybe a too many.
But lots of them are shady characters pretending to be “good”.
Or perhaps they are Star Trek-esque red shirts.🤭

Elegies: In Memoriam, Cantos LXI -LXX
Favorite line, first line from Canto LXIX

“I dream’d there would be Spring no more”

Interesting how in many “that guy” books the women tend to be a more hard-nosed than “that guy”.
This book has two of these women who are/were involved with “that guy” and wouldn’t you know it? He’s handled them both badly.

Elegies: In Memoriam, Cantos LI - LX
Tennyson claims in Canto LIX -
“My centred passion cannot move,
Nor will it lessen from to-day”

He drags your heart through his grief.

Nice tie-off of all the ends going on.

A cliffhanger in a historical biography???
Dan Jones gave me a cliffhanger chapter????
I’m so in love with Jones’s writing methods!
💕🎈🤣🎉

Always painful when the known “eaten” is confirmed.
Damn.

Elegies: In Memoriam, Cantos XLI - L
End of Canto L -
“Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.”

Twist of words
Twist of blade
Lovely when they join hands and the story wins.

Treachery hiding on all sides in this one.

Elegies: In Memoriam, Cantos XXXI - XL
Favorite lines from the end of Canto XL
“My paths are in the fields I know,
And thine in undiscover’d lands.”

Rivals the best I’ve ever read for holding your breath in anticipation.
King’s Dark Tower and Martin’s GOT come to mind all through this book, and yet I would almost put it on the YA shelves.

“Let us make war so that we might have peace, for the end of war is peace.” (Cicero’s words repeated to Henry V by his chancellor.)

Yes, the same stupid reason.
More evidence that history repeats itself.

Elegies: In Memoriam, Cantos XXI - XXX
How did I not know that Canto XXVII is where two of the greatest lines of poetry originate? How?

“T’is better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”

I’m ashamed to say I have a degree in English.
Although I never studied Tennyson.
Perhaps I should have.

My heart fears that not all the excellent players will exit the stage on their feet at the end of this book.

And the sentimentality is handled gracefully patching up years of animosity.
Great way to bring all the characters together, laying a clear path for the reader to follow.

Elegies: In Memoriam, stanzas XI-XX
Such love for a friend departed.
In stanza XVI’s ending, Tennyson ponders having Arthur return to him and instead of questioning his departed friend’s appearance, he says,
“But I found him all in all the same,
I should not feel it to be strange.”

Remember, this long Memoriam was written over a two decade period.
Twenty years! And barely through it!

“Not one for going back”
I do love these cut lines so often closing the chapters.

“…harsh and cold-blooded generalship”.
Agincourt’s bloody battlefield well described.
Not revered.
This was war in the 1400s.
Muddy, bloody, and punishing on both sides.

“Big new problem”?🤣🤣🤣

Elegies: To My Brother Charles Tennyson (a breathtakingly beautiful ode)
In Memoriam Arthur Henry Hallam (believe he was one of Tennyson’s best friends and it begins a two decade long iambic pentameter stanza-palooza)
In Memoriam, stanzas I-X (and many more to come) - my favorite is Stanza III. The personifications of Sorrow and Nature are lovely.

As treacherous as Game of Thrones ever dreamed of being. No wonder George R.R. Martin himself recommended this book series.

Brothers…crazy brothers.
And a crazy father.
And crazy stories.
Lots of crazies.
Lots of crazy shit going on.

Songs: The Brook (peaceful and lilting, appropriate for children);
The Miller’s Daughter (tawdry and not for children, then wishful);
Sea Dreams (sad and endearing);
Romney’s Remorse (unsure what to make of this one);
The Lotos-Eaters (think this one’s clearly about the effects of different drugs 🤣)