Blindness by Jose Saramago

I'm not going to beat around the bush: this book was a difficult read for a lot of reasons.

Reason #1: The style is...unique. After an extremely contagious and quickly moving plague of blindness strikes a city the government decides to quarantine the blind in an abandoned mental institution to try to contain the outbreak. For reasons unexplained beyond "names are no longer important" in the quarantine, none of the characters are named. The main characters are "the doctor", "the doctor's wife", "the girl with dark glasses", "the first blind man", and "the boy with the squint." They spend the entire book that way.

Which is awkward enough without Saramago's other stylistic choice: there are no quotation marks around anyone's speech, and he doesn't start a new paragraph when a new character begins speaking. This, naturally, makes it difficult to tell exactly who's speaking- or even if they're speaking at all. It works on the level that it's disorienting, so it's kind of like actual blindness in that way. But that being said, shouldn't sound then be the clearest thing? Or clearer, anyway? We would at least be able to tell the difference between two different speakers is all I'm saying.

Reason #2: It's incredibly violent, and graphically so. There are injuries, illnesses, attacks, fights, murders, and (again, graphic) gang rape in spades. Blood. Pus. Guns. Scissors. Did I mention the gang rape? Or, more specifically, multiple gang rapes. One woman is gang raped to death. We hear all about it.

In detail. Did I mention that part?

Reason #3: There's a lot of...excrement. The plumbing at the facility isn't the best and with society breaking down around them the blind stop caring about where they take care of business, as it were. But then the blind leave the facility because it turned out that just about everybody was blind and there wasn't any real need for the quarantine anymore, so we find out that the blind outside the facility stopped caring about...cleanliness, as well. Between the sights (one character can see), and the...smells...and the...depth...yeah, no, it's not pretty.

Reason #4: It's scarily realistic. Everything that happens, given the circumstances, is completely believable. Through the whole book you know- you know- that it's all plausible. And that's terrifying. But it's part of what makes this such a good book.

But that being said, it is a good book if you're the type that reads dramatic, depressing, intense things-- which I am but, for example, my mother is not. I wouldn't recommend this to her if Saramago paid me, she'd hate it. But if this is your thing, it's a can't miss read.

4 stars out of 5.

The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory

I've been fascinated by the Tudors for most of my life. I could recite Henry VIII's wives, children, and their fates in elementary school because that's just the kind of kid I was.

Yes, I got as many strange looks as you think.

So it's only natural that as I grew up I came across Gregory's books and fell in love, just like I fell in love with Showtime's The Tudors. It was destiny.

But all these years of research and entertainment did little to endear Katherine of Aragon to me. Of course I admired her strength and fortitude, remaining silent and faithful while her husband flaunted his affairs then divorced her, claiming they were never really married in the first place. I can't even begin to imagine the pain...I'm not going to lie, I'm a jealous girlfriend. Had I been Katherine I'd have had that Boleyn woman trampled by horses at the very least, so the fact that she didn't even do that speaks to incredible self-control.

But self-control, especially in that decadent court and the sumptuous entertainments its inspired, is really kind of boring. Honor? Piety? Integrity? Snore.

So I put off reading The Constant Princess. Katherine was boring in stories about other people, so why would I want to read a whole book about her?

To my great surprise I regretted not having read it sooner. It's excellent.

Don't get me wrong. The Other Boleyn Girl is still the jewel in Philippa Gregory's crown, but The Constant Princess without a doubt claims a very respectable 2nd place in Gregory's stunning career.

One thing I didn't like, though, was that she wrote 3/4 of it in third person EXTREMELY limited

point of view and a quarter of it in first person, with long stretches of third person broken up with the first person bits, Katherine herself giving us further insight into her actions. Which was strange because the narrator gave almost no "inside" information on any of the characters. Had Gregory written this with a more traditional third person limited it would have completely eliminated the need for Katherine's explanations and would have made the flow of the novel far smoother.

But that's really my only complaint. In The Constant Princess you get to see the beginnings of Katherine's incredible strength: her mother, Isabella of Spain. Gregory also gives an explanation for how it came to be that Katherine married first Henry's older brother Arthur- an explanation that also explains why she fought so hard to save her marriage to Henry.

It's also interesting to see Henry as a young boy as Gregory's interpretation of what he might have been (probably was) like so perfectly explains the man, the king, he became. Reading it, it can be hard to remember that this novel or, really, any and all of Gregory's novels, are merely conjectures on what might have been based on her thorough research. Gregory's gift is how real she makes her characters out to be. How human. And how well she lines up actual historical events to their perpetrators.

4 stars out of 5

Also by Philippa Gregory:

The Queen's Fool