Hi everyone! Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’ll be talking about all the books I read and DNF’d this month. I haven’t done a long wrap-up like this one in a while. I read 7 books and DNF’d 3 in March, so it was a good reading month for me. [Insert smiley face here.] Let’s talk about books.
1. HISTORICAL FICTION AND SPANISH LITERATURE: Yo, Julia (I, Julia) And Y Julia Retó A Los Dioses (And Julia Challenged The Gods) by Santiago Posteguillo
First, let’s talk about the protagonist of this duology. Julia Domna was the wife of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus and she ruled alongside her husband as the first empress of the Severan dynasty from 193 to 211. She was born in Emesa in Roman Syria to an Arab family of priests of the deity Elagabalus. Her husband, born in what today is Libya, is referred to as the first African Emperor of the Roman Empire. Julia and Septimius were also the first imperial couple, since the days of Augustus, who were madly in love with one another.
Julia was a very intelligent, strong-willed, and determined woman. She was also clever; she knew what was going to happen before anybody else did. That is, by studying the history of Rome assiduously, by watching what was happening in Rome during the reign of Commodus and the Year of the Five Emperors (193)—Pertinax, Didius Julianus, Pescennius Niger, Clodius Albinus, and Septimius Severus—by reasoning about men’s lust of power and behavior, Julia Domna predicted the future and was prepared for it. That is how she survived; how she lived through the reign of Commodus, one of the craziest emperors of Rome, and the subsequent civil wars between Septimius and the other claimants for the throne.
Now, I talk about these two books together here because they complement each other. The first book Yo, Julia (I, Julia) is about Julia’s ascent to power; about her determination to create a dynasty after Commodus death, the last emperor of the Antonine dynasty and who died without an heir. Divided into five parts, each one of these relates the story of how Julia confronted and fought every single one of her enemies—Commodus, Pertinax, Didius Julianus, Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus—to emerge victorious as the sole empress of Rome in 197, when Septimius defeated Albinus at the Battle of Lugdunum (modern Lyon, France).
The second book Y Julia Retó A Los Dioses (And Julia Challenged The Gods) is the story of Julia’s descent. Her enemies in Book 1 were all exterior. In Book 2, they are interior. Also divided in five parts, Julia’s first enemy is Plauciano, her husband’s right-hand man and most trusted advisor. A man the emperor has known since childhood but who has never liked Julia. A man who is plotting against the emperor and taking advantage of Septimius’s trust in him. A man who wants to be emperor, and Julia tries in vain to warn the emperor about his friend’s disloyalty but he disregards her concerns.
Her second enemy are her sons. More specifically, the enmity between the two of them. In fact, when ruling as co-emperors, both of them detested each other, lived in separate sections of the imperial palace and would only meet in the company of their mother. Eventually, this enmity between them gets them both killed. Geta is killed by his brother’s soldiers while Caracalla is later assassinated by enemy troops.
Macrinus, the next emperor, is also her enemy. Julia is now close to the end of her life, however, because not only is she fighting to keep her dynasty alive (though Caracalla’s death wounds the dynasty to death) and Macrinus but she is also fighting breast cancer. And her doctor knows that this is what will eventually (and soon) kill the empress. Julia’s deadliest enemies, however, are the gods themselves, who refuse to accept a foreign empress on the throne of Rome. All her problems, from the betrayal of Plauciano in the first part of the book, are orchestrated by the gods. Vesta, chief among them.
Frankly, this book is a little sad because I was watching everything Julia had fought so hard for all her life fall apart in a matter of seconds. It also brought home that without a husband, a woman couldn’t do anything in Ancient Rome. Nonetheless, I still liked this duology very much. I have been reading Posteguillo since he first published his trilogy on Scipio Africanus in 2013. Unfortunately, these books can only be read in Spanish. There is no translation to English, and they are written in Peninsular Spanish. Though completely readable for American Spanish speakers, it may take a bit to shift gears if you don’t read a lot of books written in Spanish spoken in Spain. These are also one of the few books focused on Julia Domna out there, so I highly recommend them.
2. NONFICTION AND HISTORY: The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine
This is the first book of the Penguin History of Europe Series. I picked this book up because I tried reading To Hell And Back by Ian Kershaw and realized that this was one of the last books in this series, so I decided to start from the beginning. The book too starts at the beginning. From Troy to Augustine, to be more specific, and this is a very long time. Chronologically speaking. Almost 2000 years. All books like these do this though. They talk about a long period of time in the history of humankind in the first books of the series and then shorten and shorten the further along into the series you get into. William Durant’s The History of Civilization series also does this, but this Penguin History is more current. Durant’s books are naturally outdated. I say this, but I don’t want to lessen Durant’s work and the importance of it. It is monumental and still worth reading in my opinion.
This first book of the Penguin History of Europe is very well written and researched. However, it is not an in-depth account of what occurred during those 2000 years of human history. And I wasn’t expecting it to be but I was a bit surprised that the book itself is physically so short. It is only 432 pages long, and, honestly, it tries to cover too much. There is no way you can talk elaborately of 2000 years of history in 432 pages. Nonetheless, the authors still do a good job at summarizing the main events of European history relevant to the timescale they’re talking about and introducing the next book in the series at the end. I will not, however, be reading the next four books in the series. I started the second book and put it down immediately, because it is a masterpiece of scholarship that’s probably too advanced for the general reader. And I am not in the mood right now to pick up such a scholarly tome. I will read it someday. But not today. And maybe not this year. The third book is a focused and accessible introduction to the 11th-14th centuries in European history. The tone and style are radically different from book 2, and while I could’ve read it, I’ve also already read so many books on medieval history that I am not in the mood right now to read about medieval history either. So, I put it back down as well. I will not, in fact, read the following two books either. However, I am not abandoning the series yet. I intend to pick up The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans later this year. I’ve read Richard J. Evans before and liked the first two books of his History of the Third Reich trilogy. So, this series is still on my TBR.
3. NONFICTION AND SELF-HELP: The Legacy of Absence by Tim Olson
This is a book about the impact of a father’s absence in his child(ren)’s life. A father may be absent for many reasons: work, addiction, divorce, prison, or even death. The negative impact on children is the same; this is known as the Father Wound, and all of us have a Father Wound. A child knows that his father is gone and that he has chosen to do something else rather than spend time with him and take care of him. The only exception is death, where a father does not have that choice. A child’s consequent behavior is thus a result of his feeling of being abandoned by his father. And a parent’s abandonment has repercussions on a child’s entire life, including his work, finances, relationships, and emotional well-being as an adult.
I read this book for an assignment and honestly think that more of us should pick it up. I highly recommended it to anyone interested in learning how to forgive and build a better relationship with their father.
4. CLASSICS AND HISTORICAL FICTION: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary is one of those books that I couldn’t get into when I was in college. And when I found out that I was going to read it for one of my book clubs, I didn’t think I could. But I decided to give it a try. And having a community that was reading it right along with me as well as listening to lectures that helped me understand it better helped me a lot. The book is important for a reason, and I finally understood why. I had a better teacher now than I did in college and now appreciate why Flaubert is one of the big ones in literature.
A lot of people say that nothing happens in Madame Bovary, but actually the mundane is what happens here. And this is precisely why this novel is brilliant. Because Flaubert describes the boredom of the mundane to such an extent that he is a master at it. I confess, I too used to think that Madame Bovary was about nothing and the first time I read it, it bore me to pieces. But this time I looked at Emma Bovary more closely and realized that she is bored out of her mind because no one would let her do anything. Madame Bovary reminded me so much of The Tale of Genji it was insane. The aristocratic women of the Heian Period in Japan couldn’t do anything either. They spent their entire lives inside their rooms, forced to hide their faces from men and with little or nothing to do but play the koto and read novels.
Emma Bovary is the epitome of pleasure. And the society she lived in did not let her bask in that pleasure. She wanted to live and experience everything people said she couldn’t, so she rebelled. To her, pleasure was wearing expensive clothing and mingling in high society; to her pleasure was experiencing sexual gratification and lust; to her, pleasure was living and experiencing her dreams and innermost desires in the now; she did not want to wait until she died and her soul experienced all of those things. How did you know that that was even going to happen? But she is a prisoner of the society she lived in and her dreams and desires are tethered and shackled at every turn. And it is because she is living in this constant state of bondage that Emma cheats on her husband, lies to him about her money problems and eventually kills herself. Society denies men (and women) the right to experience pleasure and Emma is the personification of a rebellion against that social violence that suffocates and inevitably kills that right. I learned this from the insightful essay about Madame Bovary and Gustave Flaubert The Perpetual Orgy written by Mario Vargas Llosa, and of which I talk about below.
Emma’s actions, however, have consequences. And her wanting to live a life of pleasure fetters her daughter to a life of poverty and servitude for the rest of her life. Emma’s death scene is also one of the best death scenes I have ever read. Few character deaths have marked me, and Emma’s death is among them. Some of the others include Andrei Bolkonsky from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Alexei Kitsenko from The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn, and Pallor from The Aurelian Cycle by Rosaria Munda.
I am glad I was able to read this book finally.
5. HISTORICAL FICTION AND ASIAN LITERATURE: We Do Not Part by Han Kang (DNF)
This is the first book I DNF’d this month. I know that the author won the Nobel Prize of Literature last year, but I just couldn’t finish this book. We Do Not Part is a book about friendship and about reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history, and I am all for bringing consciousness to others about crimes and massacres committed against innocent people, but the shock full amount of symbolism in this book wore me down. I still had 4 hours on the audiobook and I found myself wanting to read something else and to not put myself through the torture of listening to those 4 hours. So, onto the DNF pile.
6. ESSAYS AND LITERARY CRITICISM: La orgía perpetua (The Perpetual Orgy) by Mario Vargas Llosa (DNF)
This is another book I DNF’d. Divided into three parts, the first part was very insightful and interesting. The second part I couldn’t get into and the third part I didn’t even try reading honestly. Apparently Madame Bovary is a book that marked this author for life, and he explains here why this is so. But Vargas Llosa is an author I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with. He is one of the main authors of the Latino American boom, which exploded in the 1960s. The others are Julio Cortázar with his book Hopscotch, Carlos Fuentes with The Death of Artemio Cruz and Aura, Gabriel García Márquez with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Mario Vargas Llosa wrote The Feast of the Goat and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, to mention a few, and this last one is probably the only one I’ve been able to finish. He’s also known for having punched Gabriel García Márquez in the face. Vargas Llosa is one of those authors who I try reading over and over but whose books I can’t seem to finish at all. I will try again, but maybe not this essay.
7. MYSTERY AND HISTORICAL FICTION: Lost Among The Living by Simone St. James
I used to think that I didn’t read any mystery. And then I realized that I did. I just labeled them differently. Most of the mystery novels I’ve read and loved are also historical fiction novels, and I’ve always classified them as such. But they are a combination of both genres, and I have come to realize that this is the type of historical fiction novels that I read the most. Simone St. James is also a cozy mystery writer, and this is what Lost Among The Living is. A historical cozy mystery set in 1921.
The protagonist, Jo Manders, is a young woman mourning the death of her husband, Alex, after he disappears when his plane was shot down over German territory in 1918. His body, however, was never found and Jo is still wondering what happened. The military won’t tell her anything; they even refuse to give her a widow’s pension. Now, three years later, Jo is short of money and is working as a paid companion to her husband’s wealthy and condescending aunt. Her job though takes her to the family’s estate in Sussex, where all is not well. The locals say that the family is cursed and that a ghost in the woods has never rested.
And then somebody familiar arrives to the house…
I loved this book the first time I read it. I didn’t like it as much the second time, but I still liked it very much. I still loved the relationship between Jo and Alex and how much they love each other. And between the two of them I liked Alex the most. He is steadfastly loyal to his family but more than anything, he is loyal to the women in his life, including his aunt Dottie. I will definitely read this book again.
8. ROMANCE AND CONTEMPORARY FICTION: The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren
When we first meet Anna Green in the prologue, she is standing outside her apartment watching her husband (and soon-to-be ex-husband) West Weston pack up his belongings and move out. That was, after all, their agreement. They got married, lived on campus while studying at UCLA, and upon graduating, which is now, they would get a divorce. Now, three years Anna is a struggling artist working at a convenience store but is later fired after “stealing” a pack of Trident. Liam, on the other hand, is one of four heirs to the Weston Foods conglomerate but has little interest in working for the company that his family has built from ground up and is working as a professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto. He is, however, interested in the one-hundred-million dollar inheritance. There’s just one catch. He needs to have been happily married for at least five years. And this is far from the case. His family knows that he is married, they’ve just never met her. Now, Liam’s father is pressuring him to bring the girl to his sister’s wedding or he stands to lose all the money of his inheritance. So, he has no other choice but to ask his ex-wife for help.
I had a lot of fun reading this book. Yes, it is the fake-relationship trope (something that is hard for me to get into) but it is a very light-hearted, funny, and entertaining read. Anna is easy to connect with and Liam is just a guy trying to find his own spot in the world, a spot outside of the world others built for him and in which he doesn’t fit in at all. This is my first Christina Lauren book, and I admit, it’s not the first time I pick up one of their books. I’ve tried reading others and haven’t been as successful. I have learned though that if I am not in the mood for romance, I won’t finish it. And a big part of the reason why I did finish this one was because I was in the mood for it. But I was also laughing and enjoying myself a lot with this one, so I think that is a big plus. I Liked It and Will Probably Read It Again.
9. CONTEMPORARY FICTION: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (DNF)
Finally, Sue Monk Kidd. This author is in the same pile for me as Kristin Hannah. I have read one of her books, loved it, but cannot get into any of her other books. The book I read by this author that I loved is The Book of Longings and what I loved about this book is that it is focused on the women. On the women who have been silenced by the weight of time and the tethers of society. But I couldn’t get into The Secret Life of Bees or The Invention of Wings, even though I know that women are at the forefront here too. And I have tried to read The Secret Life of Bees several times, this one being the last one of those tries. Same goes for The Invention of Wings, and I have come to realize that I don’t like books set in the American South. I’m sorry, but this is the same reason why I couldn’t read The Color Purple by Alice Walker. And I am not trying to diminish the importance of slavery and the effect it has had on all the generations affected by it, but for some reason I just can’t get into these books. So, I’m going to stop trying to read The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings.
That is everything I read and DNF’d this month. It was a long post, and I appreciate you staying and reading my thoughts about these books. See you next month!
