2008 Dewey Decimal Project: 941.009 P

[rsadelle]

There's nothing like squeaking in under the wire, and that's what I'm doing this month. I just finished the book, and even though it's already past my bedtime, I'm writing my LJ entry, and then I will have fulfilled my self-imposed assignment for July.

This month's book was On Royalty: A Very Polite Inquiry Into Some Strangely Related Families by Jeremy Paxman. A chapter or two into it, I thought, "If I'm going to read a Royals book for the 900s, I should really return this in exchange for Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles. But I didn't. Instead, I worked my way, very slowly, through On Royalty. It's not that it's a bad or uninteresting book, it's just a little slow.

Difficulties:

• I had the impression that it would be about a larger array of royals, when it was mostly about the British.
  
• The book assumes a much larger knowledge of British history than I have.
  
• There are Britishisms I didn't understand. There's so much crammed into the book that it mostly doesn't matter if I didn't get the exact meaning of every Britishism.

Things I enjoyed:

• It has some bits that are quite funny.

  For most of the time the British royal family is not now, nor has it been for generations, spectacular. It is hard even to describe it as much fun. It reflects the people of Britain.

• It has some fascinating asides about varying figures in Royal history. Did you know, for example, that the man who almost became the king of Albania instead died of blood poisoning in 1923 because he "had taken the advice of his former tutor at Oxford who told him that his blindness could be cured by having his teeth removed"?
  
• It led me to some interesting history on Wikipedia. I read all about Marie Antoinette.

Perhaps the funniest thing about the book is that he keeps referring to democracy/republicanism as more sensible than monarchy, and yet the British just aren't ready to give it up: "Republicanism, for all its commonsensicalness, remains a hobby like campaigning for phonetic spelling." In his acknowledgements, he tells us that, "Bill Purdue, Reader in British History at the Open University began his exhaustive commentary with the words, 'I enjoyed reading this manuscript, even though I am largely in disagreement with the author's sentiments and thesis.'" (Oddly, I found the British-style single quotes less irritating in this than I do in fiction. [I refuse to read fiction with single quotes for dialogue.])