FIVE (MOSTLY) MEDIEVAL BOOKS TO READ THIS SPRING
This is what's been on my desk
The absolute state of my office at the moment: you’d have to see it to believe. There are books everywhere. Every shelf is filled. No, double-filled: books shelved spine up, books piled horizontally in front of them. Every flat surface is covered: the side tables, the coffee table. The printer table. The mantlepiece. Under the tables. Behind the sofa. Next to the sofa, stacks piled as high as they will go without toppling. (They sometimes topple.) And beside my desk, four self-supporting piles, stepped like some pre Columbian South American sacrificial pyramid. It’s out of control.
And still, every day, more arrive. They come from Amazon drivers, Royal Mail, the regular postman, UPS, Fed-Ex. Books upon books upon books. Some I’ve ordered because I need them. Some I’ve ordered because I thought they sounded cool. Some I didn’t order, they were sent speculatively for my review. Sometimes a box of books I’ve written arrives: some leather-bound Templars, half a dozen copies of Henry V in Spanish, Essex Dogs in Ukrainian, the Hollow Crown in Klingon.
At some point, I fear I am going to be buried by these books - entombed like some Pompeiian horndog suffocated in the Lupanar when Vesuvius went pop. Preserved forever in position, mummified within the metastasising tomes.
This is bad for me.
But it is good for you, because amid all these volumes are some rather interesting new history books either just out, or coming soon.
So if you wish to add one more volume to your own TBR pile, here’s my pick of what’s coming up for all y’all medieval heads this spring.
Self Help From the Middle Ages by Peter Jones
You know a book is likely to succeed when strangers come up and ask you about it. I was reading a review copy of this one in a bar in Madrid the other day when the three people beside me all asked for a look. What a title! How was I finding it? Was there really anything to learn from the medieval times? I’ve reviewed this for a newspaper (forthcoming), so will hold back my extended remarks for next weekend - but suffice to say that this is indeed a great idea for a book.
