I decided to read this on the recommendation of two different friends. I had no doubt that I’d enjoy it with it being a Booker Prize winner to boot. I could not have been more wrong. This book was extremely hard work. It has taken me six weeks to get through it. Six weeks, when I’m supposed to be reading one book every week! For the first time this year I am behind schedule.

I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy any aspect of it. I hardly know any history at all so I certainly learned a lot and had plenty to think about. There are a few beautifully written passages. But this book failed me overall because I simply didn’t enjoy it. The writing style is very dull. It has a cast of thousands. It’s difficult to work out what is significant and what seems to have been thrown in on a whim. For at least the first third of the book I didn’t realise that ‘he’, unless otherwise stated, refers to Cromwell.

A couple of weeks ago, when Hilary Mantel won another Booker Prize for the sequel, I decided that I must be missing something, so I downloaded the spoken (unabridged) version of Wolf Hall. That certainly helped me to figure out who was who but after a while the spoken book started to grate on me. At 24 hours long it felt like a marathon. I discovered that it takes longer to listen to a book than to read it. In some ways it’s more difficult to listen; it’s easy to get distracted, just by thinking your own thoughts. Then it become necessary to rewind which isn’t easy on the Kindle.

I am relieved 1) to have finished Wolf Hall and 2) to see that, according to Amazon reviews anyway, that I’m not the only one to have found it hard going. Having said that I’m not ruling out reading Bring Out The Bodies in future, because I’m somehow hooked, but I would definitely like to read a few books that are more to my taste before taking on what may be another struggle.

(41st in 2012)

This was this month’s reading group book. I enjoyed it very much. There is plenty of anger coming through at the attitudes towards women at the time and rightly so. It sounds like the 50s and 60s was a horribly claustraphobic and restrictive time for an intelligent woman living in the sticks. The writing is searing, brutally honest but nostalgic too. There is so much insight crammed in too that it’s quite dizzying. I got through the book in what seemed like no time at all. Definitely recommended.

(40th in 2012)