Fiction

Prescient remarks about things like smoking being banned also irritate me.

I had to give up reading novels set just before WWI because invariably some old person would sagely pronounce that soon, very soon there would be a terrible war.

In far too many historical novels the characters are just 20th or 21st century people dressed in funny clothes, will fully modern attitudes, ideas, and behaviors. Recently I started a book called The Boleyn King by Laura Andersen. The premise is that Anne Boleyn did not miscarry of a son in January 1536, which is what actually happened, but carried the baby to term. Really cool idea, because if that had happened and the baby lived, Henry would never have divorced Anne and she probably would have outlived him. She probably also would have gone on to have other children, but that's not very important. This novel takes up when William, that son, is turning 18 and about to become King in his own right, without any regents looking over him. The problem is, all of the characters in the novel behave like modern people. I had to put it down after about 50 pages because I just couldn't get past that.

The reason books like "The Other Boleyn Girl" by Phillippa Gregory are so popular, despite real howlers of historical inaccuracy, is that the people reading them know nothing of that era other than what they've seen in things like the dreadful Tudor series on TV. I've been reading about these people for over fifty years, mainly straightforward biography, and I become crazed by this sort of stuff.