52 in 2011

16. Victoria's Daughters by Jerrold M. Packard 

This is a more serious, but still readable, history of Queen Victoria and her troubled relationships with her five daughters.  Victoria's parenting style can best be described as dysfunctional.  While this would have been bad enough as a purely personal tragedy, several of her daughters played major roles in European politics and the emotional fallout of two generations of screwed up women helped contribute to World War I and the Russian Revolution.  For those with very bad family histories of their own, there are elements of this book that may be triggering -- reading about Victoria's parenting gave me bad flashbacks to my own abusive family.  Even so, this is a highy readable and enlightening book and I do recommend it.


17.  Sex with the Queen by Eleanor Herman

rhiannon14 has her love of bad history - this book is one of my bad history guilty pleasures.  Imagine if history were written by the writers of Cosmopolitan magazine, and you have this book.  It purports to tell the tales of European queens and princesses who took lovers. It say "purports" because I've seen better research in high school term papers.  Herman clearly did some reading, but her sources are secondary and highly biased.  She is also wildly inconsistent in what sources she chooses to credit.  One the one hand, she concludes (almost certainly correctly) that Anne Boleyn was innocent of adultery but at the same time believes ever bad story ever told about both Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette.  (OK, she doesn't credit the story about Catherine and the horse, but that's about the only one she dismisses).  It's trashy history for people who thrive on reality shows and The Tudors on cable.  It's also undeniably fun to read in the same way that Plan Nine from Outer Space is fun to watch.

Her companion book, Sex with the King, about royal mistresses, is next up because it's hard to take my eyes off this train wreck.