Wolf Hall... struggling...

it's

first time I read it i stuck with it for some odd reason (very annoyed by "he"s too). Afterwards I felt like I had really missed something (read it as dozing off each night) so read it straight through again and LOVED it and can't wait for the sequel.
I't quite a handy crash course in power mongering amongst other things.

For me, it wasn't that I didn't enjoy it - I did, very much, but I found it required my full attention and concentration - if that wandered for a couple of minutes I had no idea what was going on! It's a good read but certainly not an easy read. Better for on holiday when you can devote great swathes of time to it without dropping off to sleep after a hard day.

I had one go at WH, and gave up.
Had a second run at it recently and I'm loving it - am now about 2/3 of the way through - this time it just suddenly clicked with me, and I'll definitely be reading the sequel.

I gave up on Night Train To Lisbon!

I can't agree that 'nothing happened' but I do think she could have condensed the 'waffle' and reached TC's death in this one.

Lupin supine - a sleepy draught. Falls from my hands night by night.

Join the club! It's a very common afflication. There will be a medical name for it soon. I got about a third of the way through but as I mostly read before I fall asleep at night I was finding it impossible to focus on the storyline and kept falling alseep and then having to recap the previous four pages - gave up in the end!

Sorry to disagree with the posts sbove but i didn't like it at all, i struggled to follow the storyline and found the ending anticlimactic to sau the least - i kept waiting for something to happen and..... nothing did. Dull, dull, dull.

Now Last Train to Lisbon - that's a cracker!

Library audiobooks are your friend. Suddenly my 90 min daily dog-walk is all edumacational...

I loved Wolf Hall, or rather I found I loved Thomas Cromwell . I think Hilary Mantel is writing a follow-up. Hope it comes out soon, although its got to have the ultimate sad ending!

Sorry, should have been 'reading all of these' (as in history books, both coffee table proper-upperers and HisLitLite!)

I love travelling the UK after reading all of this. My partner lives in Deptford at the moment and I go to Greenwich wherever possible and imagine the old palace there. Was a little dissapointed I couldn't find a marker for it's remains, I think they're still doing something with it.

Yum - Shardlake. I haven't read the new one yet.

Have instead been measuring out my life in tediously long Wolf-pages with not even a coffee spoon to motivate me.

Sorry, I loved it - warts & all. I also adore A Place of Greater Safety. I didn't think any book could make me fall in love with both Desmoulins and Danton, and even have some sympathy for Robespierre. Passionate stuff!

GL, Am giggling as I've just been on a Shardlake thread and said I know I can't do the heavy literary stuff and prefer HistLite, (love that genre!)

BG, I've spent the day with three two year olds and they are just like Henry!

Sorry, my sort of makeup I guess, History Literature. Or History Lite.

What's Hislit?

I loved Wolf Hall, was sad to put it down. I didn't find any difficulty with the text. My FIL to be didn't get on with it though. I thought it was a lot better than the HisLit stuff that keeps making the best seller lists.

DD has just said she wants to read it - but I think I put her off it!

God, Henry was a twit though, wasn't he? Like the Red Queen in Alice. Off with his head; oh dear I wish I had him back; he was a nice man; off with HIS head instead; oh dear why did I do that; I blame my advisors; off with THEIR heads.

I can't bear it staring at me when I wonder what to read next. I'm going to give in and inflict it on someone else give it to Oxfam.

Imagine if you were a teenager and you picked this up to start reading some prize winning fiction!

Finished it. I was entirely underwhelmed by the ending but liked the Thomas More stuff just before the end and found that quite gripping.

I found it a challenge to get going but did get caught up in the detail of it all - I loved Cromwell - a sort of Tudor Zelig - and found it a very poignant read knowing how badly it all ended for him. I think the fact that most of us know a little bit about that period of history (roister-doistering Henry VIII, tragic Anne B, the reformation etc) but Mantel was able to use that assumed knowledge and then fill it out, make Henry and Anne convincing characters rather than players in a historical trajectory which was brilliant. It also made me think more about the reformation - the fact that deeply religious people such as Henry VIII and Thomas More thought they would go to hell if they turned away from Rome (TM, of course, refused ultimately) - it was a very real horror for them.

I found the sexual politics very intriguing - wanted to hear more about Mary B, loved the games Anne B played. All the women in it were pretty interesting, in fact: Katherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour, the servant he takes in (whose name I have forgotten ). It did, however, seem a very unlikely Booker winner.