{"id":2857,"date":"2005-12-26T21:47:00","date_gmt":"2005-12-27T02:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=2857"},"modified":"2010-04-20T22:34:33","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T03:34:33","slug":"book-report-ruled-britannia-by-harry-turtledove-2002","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/26\/book-report-ruled-britannia-by-harry-turtledove-2002\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove (2002)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I bought this book<\/a> from the discount rack on the Barnes and Noble in New York at the end of September, and I read it in October, but I have yet to post a report on it as we gave it to my mother-in-law as a gift for Christmas. But here it is, gentle reader: my first foray into Turtledove’s alternate history, as best I can remember it.<\/p>\n

The premise of the book: The Spanish Armada succeeded, and King Philip deposes Queen Elizabeth and locks her in the tower of London. A London-based playwright, William Shakespeare, becomes intangled in a plot to overthrow the Spanish and must compose a play designed to fire up the British at the same time as he’s commissioned to write an elegaic play for Philip.<\/p>\n

The book’s language and research undoubtedly capture a lot of the time period; the English is modern, but the sentence construction tips its hat to the middle English of Shakespeare’s day. Unfortunately, the book slips into a bit of repetition that made me impatient for it to get on with the story. Also, as I was not a student of the detailed history of the era, some of the subtleties are lost on me.<\/p>\n

Still, it’s an interesting question and perhaps one of Turtledove’s lesser efforts–after all, the blogosphere raves about his other work. I won’t totally pan it since I did give it as a gift (perhaps a passive-aggressive response for Deliver Us From Evil<\/a><\/i>). However, if you’re speed-reading in an effort to make the Fifty Book Challenge, this book presents a speed bump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I bought this book from the discount rack on the Barnes and Noble in New York at the end of September, and I read it in October, but I have yet to post a report on it as we gave it to my mother-in-law as a gift for Christmas. But here it is, gentle reader: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2857"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6179,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2857\/revisions\/6179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}