Bye, Claudius

About a year or so ago I wrapped up a book (don't remember which one now) and was stumped about what to read next. So I pulled together my list of 10 favorite books of all time, and sent out a mass email to friends and family giving them out as my recommendations to everyone else, and pleading for a return of the favor. I got lots of really good suggestions that I've been trying to incorporate into my reading plan. A particularly interesting set of suggestions came from Jay, a good friend of Stacy's Aunt Joyce. His were easily the most far-reaching in scope and topic. Some I probably would not pursue; others I probably wouldn't have pursued, but for the fact that now I'm intrigued just because they're on such a wild list. But most of them were immediately interesting.

One of the books on there, and I can't remember if I'd heard about it before or not, was I, Claudius by Robert Graves. I borrowed it from the Los Angeles library (there's a branch only blocks from our house!) and started reading it back in June. I'm a horrifically slow reader, often taking two or three months to get through a modest-sized book, but I had lots of downtime last week on airplanes and in airports and I managed to plow through it. What a cool book! It is historical fiction, and I'm sure there's a lot of fiction in it, but from what I can gather (using that most trusted of resources, Wikipedia), most of the "soft stuff" portrayed in the novel at least has its origin in legend and rumors from the time period. If you like intrigue, lots of backstabbing and hubris out the wah-zoo, if you like characters dastardly wicked and thoroughly depraved, you should give old Claudius a try.

It is the "autobiographical" story of the youth and rise to power of Rome's unlikeliest emperor, Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Claudius. (See what I mean by my over-reliance on Wikipedia?) Though the reader immediately knows otherwise, he is widely accepted by his family and fellow Romans as a sickly, stammering, spastic idiot of little consequence - so insignificant that there's no pressing need to plot his assassination, which is certainly convenient, because everyone else in the novel drops like flies. The life story plays out over the backdrop of 1st century Rome with its ludicrously overindulgent first family, endless frontier battles and ever present in-town intrigues. It's a really wonderfully detailed view into the life in Rome in the imperial family and all their hangers-on, with all the behind-the-scenes deals and hidden agendas. I'm sure the parallels to our modern republic are not incidental. Lots of names, lots of relationships (everyone is incestuously married to everyone else at some point in the novel), it gets hard to keep them all straight. I wish I'd taken some notes when I started. But all in all, a really good read and I can see why Jay had it on his list.

Next on the agenda: The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. General relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory for dummies!