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Nov. 16th, 2011 09:31 amCONQUERED BY HADRIAN.
When I mentioned I was reading The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Youcenar, a lot of people mentioned they'd tried and failed. I now join your ranks.
It's especially annoying because I was a good two thirds of the way through the book. And it's not like I expected it to get any better, I knew from the start it was likely I would be reading a dreadfully boring book. But it was just barely interesting enough to keep me hooked, until finally the tedium built up to a point where I couldn't go any further. I have literally fallen asleep while reading this book twice.
The book is essentially a long-form biographical letter from Hadrian to his teenaged cousin, Marcus Aurelius, who would eventually succeed him. It's a life story told by a man who knows he is dying, and for whom one of the pivotal events of his life involved the suicide of a lover. So it's very frequently a book about death, the contemplation of death, the imminence of it and the persistence of it. It's also about the details of running an empire, the picky little administrivia of the city and the provinces.
And so, after two hundred pages of what basically amounted to DEATH AND TAXES, I am done.
When I mentioned I was reading The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Youcenar, a lot of people mentioned they'd tried and failed. I now join your ranks.
It's especially annoying because I was a good two thirds of the way through the book. And it's not like I expected it to get any better, I knew from the start it was likely I would be reading a dreadfully boring book. But it was just barely interesting enough to keep me hooked, until finally the tedium built up to a point where I couldn't go any further. I have literally fallen asleep while reading this book twice.
The book is essentially a long-form biographical letter from Hadrian to his teenaged cousin, Marcus Aurelius, who would eventually succeed him. It's a life story told by a man who knows he is dying, and for whom one of the pivotal events of his life involved the suicide of a lover. So it's very frequently a book about death, the contemplation of death, the imminence of it and the persistence of it. It's also about the details of running an empire, the picky little administrivia of the city and the provinces.
And so, after two hundred pages of what basically amounted to DEATH AND TAXES, I am done.
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