Dominic’s Reviews > The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers > Status Update

So close and yet so far...

I'm getting there... It's become a slog which is a shame but I'm going to finish it

This is well written and well researched it is just so damned repetitive!

This book is longer than its page count, tiny font and chapters squished back to back with little space to manoeuvre!

It is good but I'm just bored of it... However, I'm not someone who can stop reading a book, especially as the topic itself is interesting!

Finally sat down and read some more of this, I keep finding my concentration slipping which is a shame because it is broadly interesting, just repetitive, and like most history books the sheer volume of names (many of which are also repeated multiple times throughout the history of one family) makes it a confusing read at times...

Something that breaks up the flow of reading this is the constant use of quotes from contemporary sources, this wouldn't be so bad but MacDonald Fraser has chosen to use their spellings so I have to take a moment to puzzle out that 'utheris' is 'others', 'pwnyssching' is 'punishing' and 'quhatsoevir' is 'whatsoever'... This means I spend much longer reading the quotes than I otherwise would have done!

Okay I'm sure that Pratchett read this book and drew inspiration for the names of the wee free men: "Eliott... was one of many Jock Elliots... he was Little Jock, and there were also plain Jock, Roweis Jock, Sim's Jock, young Jock and Scot's Hob's Jock." All that's missing is Not-As-Big-As-Little-Jock-Jock-But-Bigger-Than-Wee-Jock-Jock!

Thought I'd better read some more of this one, it is good and about an interesting and not often talked about period of British history, but I feel a little too in depth and at times repetitive, the next part is going through a chronological history of the Borders though so that may be a bit more interesting, lets find out!

The footnotes are far too many and really take me away from the paragraph I happen to be reading, but I'm too much of a book completionist to skip them!