#RIP Sharon Kay Penman

[richarddukeofgloucester]

Just re-reading The Sunne in Splendour, wishing for a film adaptation... several film adaptations and/or a TV series adaptation that continues to be renewed until every scene on every single page of the entire 900+ pages of the entire novel has been included along with every single historical detail that has been discovered since its publication. Thank you, @breathingwithnoheir , for pointing out that one mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger and make tremendous demands when it comes to an undertaking such as this! 

[thistle-and-thorn]

Do you have books or poetry that you reread at specific times/seasons/moods?

Oh hiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am not a great re-reader to be completely honest with you because i read so slowly that it feels like wasted time a little bit. There are works that I revisit and read sections of or associate really strongly with the seasons though. I think I prefer lighter stuff in the summer and as the months get colder, then my reading tastes get weirder or more non-fiction-y?

Like Spring is Romantic/Light Academia Season so books like:

The Silver Horn of Robin Hood; The Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley; all of Jane Austen; Anne of Green Gables; As You Like It; Much Ado About Nothing with poems like "The Highwayman"; "The Hound of Heaven"; "A Passionate Shepherd to His Love"; Song of Songs; "How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways"; Joy Davidman's sonnets to C.S. Lewis but particularly Sonnet XXIX; Shakespeare's Sonnet 29.

Summer is like the Epics/Adventure/Series/General Escapism:

Stephen Fry's Troy; The Iliad; Swiss Family Robinson; all of Sharon Kay Penman's books i love this woman rip queen; The Queen's Thief books by Meghan Whalen Turner aka the greatest story ever told; I also love reading some Amy Tan's books; mysteries series like i love a Longmire book in the summer; middle grade stuff like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson; with poems like "When I Have Crossed the Bar"; "Annabel Lee" by Poe; "Having a Coke with You" by Frank O'Hara and honestly this is spicy but also "Please Master" by Allen Ginsberg i'm not sorry

Autumn is like Dark Academia/Classics:

The Oresteia; The Odyssey; Trojan Women; The Silence of the Girls; Great Expectations; The Matthew Shardlake mysteries; I just read If We Were Villains and The Essex Serpent which are both very dark academia; love a book about an author like I'm really looking forward to reading the biography of Margaret Wise Brown that came out recently; Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber; Antony Sherr's The Year of the King; George Bernard Shaw's commentaries on Shakespeare. Poems/collections like Averno and The Meadowlands by Louise Gluck; October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepherd

Winter is like I'm Reading By the Fire, Comfort Me

I mean like blah blah i genuinely love A Christmas Carol; Jack London's A Call of the Wild; Sherlock Holmes stories; The Once and Future King by T.H. White; Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis; A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas; poems like "The Shortest Day" by Susan Cooper; A Letter to a Friend by Fra Giovanni; “The Lament of Art O’Leary”; my grandmother's favorite poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert W. Service; "Do not go gently into that good night" also by Dylan Thomas; "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Impulse" by Robert Frost

What about you???

[the-romantic-lady]

I just finished When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman and I am shattered. My heart is still racing. I loved all the characters and their tragedies and losses were too much. A rollercoaster of emotions. I couldn't even figure out who I was rooting for. I couldn't stop crying for Stephen honestly. The book is amazing. Do yourself a favour and read it.

[pouncequick]

RIP to Sharon Kay Penman. We are fortunate to have all the wonderful books she brought into the world.

[dangermousie]

So, I finished Prince of Dogs and Sanglant x Liath is better than your OTP ever could be

“...the heap of garbage beside the altar, which now stirred, woken by that scuff or by the perfume of her secrecy or by the music of the flutes, to reveal dogs and some kind of ghastly creature, surely not human, heavily chained and clothed in the tattered remains of a tabard marked with a black dragon. Yet it had substance and weight, unlike a daimone; it had unkempt black hair as tangled and ratted as that of a filthy ascetic who has sworn off the trivial clothing of human grooming. It had arms and legs, hands and feet, very humanlike, and a cast of skin made dark by grime. It was a hideous thing, so matted and foul that it might as easily have been a grotesque illusion born out of Bloodheart’s vile magic. Or so she hoped. Then it swung round, shoulders bracing as against an attack, and she saw its face. “God have mercy,” she whispered, the sound forced from her by a shock so profound that she forgot everything, everyone, and even her purpose for being here: The Eika chieftain who sat, unwitting, below her, an easy target. “Sanglant.”

YESSSS. Liath is the one who finds Sanglant! And the one who frees him by killing the evil magician who tortured him for a year!!! OMG I loved the trope reversal there. (Though the fact that Sanglant, after almost a year of torture, still was with it enough to try to take out the wizard on his own - I love him. But he is not a magician so...)

I also love that she realizes that OMG she vowed to love no other when she thought he was dead, which was all well and good and very safe, except now he is alive and she has to deal with a living man, and one who is quite different to the shining knight sans peur e sans reproche she used to know but is now a feral and not entirely sane wreck.

Also, this was glorious. Fucked up as hell but glorious. I am always a fan of the feral nutcases.

 She nocked the arrow, but Sanglant and a half dozen Eika dogs hit the melee before she could get a shot off. He had nothing, only his hands, to fight with. Without thinking, she swung a leg over the railing, meaning to drop down, to save him—

His attack was as swift and as brutal as that of the Eika dogs. He had laid two Eika out flat and ripped one’s throat out with his own teeth while she gaped in horror. An Eika swung hard at him, but a dog leaped between them and took the cut meant for the prince while the rest of the pack swarmed the would-be killer, bearing him down to the flagstones. The other Eika retreated.

Liath has her work cut out for her though because in addition to the whole “Henry will buck all tradition and will make bastard his heir because he loves him so” (father - son reunion made me sniffle, btw, though not as much as Henry sitting in Sanglant’s tent, comforting his nightmares) which means he has to marry an appropriate person, not a possible magician with no kin especially due to the dynastic fight this will cause, he is also deeply and long-term messed up - he forgets words, he has nightmares, he scours his skin raw, he growls like a dog half the time, and he refuses to stop wearing his iron dog collar as a reminder of his torture, among many other things. Dude is understandably a complete mess.

ALSO OMG THE SCENE WHERE HE ASKS LIATH TO CUT HIS HAIR OMG. And these sentences Then, and finally, as if only when he had scrubbed himself clean of the breath of his captivity dared he acknowledge her, he looked up to where she stood half hidden among the rest. He had known she was there all along. ‘Liath.’  basically did me in.  And I love that he’s a total scarecrow and a mess and she’s still wants him so badly:

He knelt suddenly and with a sharp sigh. A tang of the old smell, the reek of his imprisonment, still clung to him and no doubt would for some time, but standing this close was no punishment. Ai, Lady, his hair was coarse and too matted to be truly clean yet, but when sometimes she had to shift him to get a better angle for cutting, she touched his skin and would bite her lip to stop herself from trembling, and go on.

Like, you guys, I ship this so hard and it KILLS ME that nobody among my followers read these books, which are amazing and shippy and whumping heaven but also dense enough to be a Sharon Kay Penman historical novel if the history was real and not a fantasy take on it.

Oh, and I screamed when I got to this, literally screamed:

“May God have mercy on us all,” murmured Henry. He took Sanglant by the elbow and helped him rise. “How did you survive?” As if in answer—the only answer he knew how to give—Sanglant turned his head to look at Liath.

Like - she is his savior in both literal and metaphorical way and in every way that matters. My heart my heart my heart.

Also that scene at the feast where he sees food and goes crazy is awfully painful, especially since he recollects himself and then With an effort made the more obvious by the way his hands shook, the prince commenced eating again, only very, very slowly and with such painstaking care that anyone would know he could barely stop himself from gobbling down his food like a savage. Like I need a whole book where it’s just Sanglant recovering and getting better and normal and getting rid of that awful collar and having meals. Hahahahaha yes epic fantasy I am not getting that. Also I did love Alain being so good and understanding with him - I rag on him for being so saintly as to be boring - but so far he’s proven to be Liath’s savior and Sanglant’s helper. He’s a really really good dude. Though I still get bored with him.

Also, this:

He had endured hunger for a long time. He had dreamed of her, but she had been a shade, a remembered shadow given brightness by his own despair and need. Now he touched her on the cheek, as she had once touched him in the silence of the crypt. She did not respond, she did not draw back, but he felt the rhythm of her breathing. His was not so steady.

“Marry me, Liath,” he said, because it was now the only thing he knew to say to her. Hadn’t she cut his hair, back there by the stream? Hadn’t she freed him from Bloodheart’s chains? Hadn’t his memory of her been all that kept him from drowning in madness?

I knew it! Old Sanglant, who was 100% sane and functional, was never going to propose marriage or seek a relationship even, but the new Sanglant has been so broken down to basic needs, he doesn’t care for societal rules at all. Though the fact he thinks she may not want him because he’s not what he was :(

And I loved that when Hugh tried to abuse her again, Liath, who normally gets utterly paralyzed and can’t say a word, called for him and because of his insane hearing and their soulmateyness he heard and went to the rescue and she was saved, the first time during all those awful encounters she was saved. And I find it deeply symbolic that she fought so hard not to give that magic book to Hugh and he had to brutalize it out of her, but here she voluntarily gave it to Sanglant for safe-keeping (he had no idea what it was even) even if she normally refuses to even mention it.

MY OTP IS AMAZING AND ON TO BOOK 3 AND YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE MISSING, GUYS.