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I recorded two more of the horrid Letters of Two Brides today – Louise’s letters 21 and 22. I hate her so. She’s a repulsive twit. I seriously considered begging some LibriVox Balzac fan to take over Louise’s letters for me, even if it meant discarding all my recordings… but then I counted up the remaining letters and, since I did the last few already (hoping Louise would come to a bad end and she did!) there are only 14 more that I’ll have to read. I guess I can put up with Louise 14 more times.

After I was done with Horrid Louise, I rewarded myself with Chapter 9 of A Room with a View :)

There’s a nice beef stew on the stove with a rosemary ciabatta to go with it, and grapes and cheese for after — smoked jack and a double-cream gouda I found at Trader Joe’s today. Dan and I are both very tired so we’re going to watch Bad TV tonight and laze around. We’ve got last night’s Survivor, and maybe a new Office in the tivo, and two more episodes of The Tudors to go through. We started The Tudors last night and, well, frankly, it’s pretty bad. Tacky. Dan says it’s exactly what you’d expect of Showtime. But, y’know, once you get hooked in a soap opera miniseries you might as well keep going… There are a lot of cringeworthy historical inaccuracies, but then some fun and relatively accurate bits, like the dancing. They must have hired a good dancing coach — looks like proper early English Renaissance dancing to my eye. And Tomas Tallis is in it. Not sure why they gave him a rats-nest hair-don’t (maybe to make him look like a musician??) and of course he conducts by waving his hands around vaguely and making soulful faces, but at least some of the time they use actual period music for the soundtrack and show the musicians playing on proper period instruments. I nearly turned the show off when the Renn Faire groupies appeared, but I gritted my teeth and got over it.

It’s nice to see Henry and his court and family portrayed as real humans. The Henry actor (can’t think of the name, but he played the soccer coach in Bend it like Beckham) is pretty good, though once in a while he reminds us of Ben Stiller (How dare you make me bleed my own blood!). Catharine of Aragon is quite good, as is Anne Boleyn.

There are far too many obnoxious sex scenes. Don’t let your kids watch. Bleah.