Bridget Jones's Diary

Synopsis
Neurotic twentysomething Bridget Jones searches for a career and a man, not necessarily in that order.

My thoughts
So I'm about 17 years late on this book, but it was worth it. I'm what Bridget calls a Smug Married; I guess I deserve that because I thoroughly enjoyed watching her flail around in the dating pool and I'm very happy I got to live vicariously through a fictional British nutcase for a couple days.

Part of the charm of this book is Bridget's histrionics. No one does hyperbole like the British, and Helen Fielding takes the everyday frustrations that we all experience and raises them to the nth degree. The result is pure comedy and Bridget is a fantastic character. She's recognizable and easy to relate to, but her experiences are much funnier than anything that would happen in real life. Fielding even manages to take the decidedly unfunny subjects of a parent's midlife crisis and the crumbling of a marriage and makes them funny.

Minor quibbles: the book veered off into the truly unbelievable at the very end, and I was a little unsatisfied with the romantic resolution because it was too perfect. The Pride and Prejudice tie-in was clever but distracting.

There's a sequel and now a third book coming out later this year. If Bridget couldn't program her VCR in 1996, I'd hate to think how she's dealing with her iPhone today. It's tempting, especially since the original book is so dated, but I think I'll skip the pre-order and wait for the reviews. And who am I kidding? At the rate I'm going I won't get around to reading it until 2030 anyway.

Bottom line
Quick, funny book. Perfect for vacation or escaping from the in-laws.

Fine print
Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

The Lute Player

Synopsis
The crusade of Richard the Lionheart, told by his mother, his lute player, and his sister-in-law.

My thoughts
This is a long book - more than 500 pages - and a lot happens. But what's more striking is what doesn't happen.

This book is remarkable in that it was published in 1951 and it presents Richard I as a homosexual man. Norah Lofts was ahead of her time; she writes Richard without judgment. But she doesn't go any further. The legend (as I remember it) goes that Richard was kidnapped and held captive on his way home from his crusade. No one knew where he was, but his lute player Blondel went from castle to castle searching for him. Blondel would sing a verse from a song he and Richard had written and then he'd pause. He finally found Richard when Richard replied with the next verse from wherever he was locked up. In my imagination, Richard and Blondel were in love, but Lofts shies away from writing it this way and Blondel doesn't even get to tell this most dramatic part of the story. Instead, Richard's sister-in-law, who wasn't even there, gets to narrate this part.

None of this actually happened anyway, but it makes a nice story. There was a medieval lute player named Blondel and he did go on crusade. Richard and his wife Berengaria of Navarre did not have a happy marriage, although Lofts created Berengaria's bastard half-sister Anna for the book. This led to an extremely unsatisfactory love quadrangle: Anna loved Blondel, who loved Berengaria, who loved Richard, who loved Blondel. Fortunately, Eleanor of Aquitaine's point of view was free of this messy narrative and all the better for it. Eleanor is a fascinating woman and I enjoyed her chapters a lot. She also balanced out the hysterical Berengaria nicely.

Bottom line
Solid historical fiction, if a little dated. There's also that anticlimactic ending.

Fine print
The Lute Player, by Norah Lofts
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.