Sunday, January 22, 2012

London by Edward Rutherford

I have wanted to read this book for about 10 years but the copy I had had print so small that I couldn't comfortably read it. Now that I have a Kindle I decided to download it. It was Edward Rutherford's first novel and I found that it bounced around quite a bit and I would get lost from generation to generation but I stuck with it and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's Historical Fiction but the historical part was quite accurate. I was particularly interested in the beginnings of London. I had no idea that Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, among other buildings, are so old. I didn't realize that London wasn't really the centre of the United Kingdom. Many of the Kings were French and didn't even live in London. 

I had no idea that, aside from the Romans, there were so many different cultures that made up England. That explains why, although they all speak English there were many different dialects and it would appear, to me anyway, why there are so many different accents. There were Danes and Celts and French and Latin,  so many other languages spoken up until relatively recently, or more recently than I had thought. 

For some reason (probably because I have a lot of British in my ancestry) I've been very interested in the Monarchy and this was a perfect book to learn this from.

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