fun read

I just got reminded why I stay away from mysteries: they suck me in and don't let me go until the laundry piles up, the kids are late for school, and the dishes rebel and wash themselves (I wish).

The reminder came in the form of a book I grabbed off the "Assignments" shelf in the library. It's a handy-dandy shelf that has multiple paperback (subway-handy) copies of Classics (and the occasional "hunh"). The cover is quite lame, if you ask me, but the story, well...

It's about an inspector who gets laid up in a hospital and looks at a picture (of a painting) of Richard III and decides Ricky doesn't look like the Monster history makes him out to be.

What makes the book so super-fun is that he crossexamines people's inadequate knowledge of hearsay history and discovers loads of unquestioned contradictions. Then he applies the same investigator's logic to historical sources. Where are the breaks in the routine? Who stands to gain?

Now I'll go reread Shakespeare's Richard III, and excellent double-feature, I think.

Oh, yes, and the book I read is called The Daughter of Time and is by Josephine Tey.