You have me confused with a literate person
Category: Books & Writing...
Posted Friday, June 09, 2006 at 11:40 AM [GMT-6]

For the most part, my arrangement with the Hatchette Book Group (formerly Time Warner Book Group) has worked pretty well. The folks in the Online Marketing group will occasionally contact me with recommendations from its publishers' upcoming releases and give me the opportunity to select any that I want for review purposes. I'm also able to request anything from their current inventory and they'll try to accommodate the request. It's a pretty sweet deal, and one that I don't take for granted.

In fact, I can also ask that they not send anything to me, during those periods where I can't handle a new addition to my reading list (which is the situation I'm now in).

But sometimes things take an unexpected turn. Such was the case last Monday afternoon when the doorbell rang and I got to the front door just as the UPS truck was pulling away, having deposited on the porch the now-familiar tan cardboard mailer containing a new book. That's odd, I thought; I don't recall requesting a new book.

It got odder when I tore open the package and extracted this: Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England, by Juliet Barker.

My next thought was a paraphrase of Owen Wilson's line in Shanghai Noon II: what in our history together makes you think I'm capable of something like this?

I admit it. I'm not a fan of historical non-fiction. Granted, I'm still engaged in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, the action of which takes place several centuries ago admidst actual historical events and characters, but it's still fiction, however realistically the author has painted the context. (And even then, the fact that it's taken me five months to get halfway through the book should tell you something.)

A similar thing happened last year, when an book about a real-life Boston crime family showed up on my porch, unsolicited. I read ten pages and tossed it aside.

I'm sure that Ms. Barker has written an engaging and accurate account of the Battle of Agincourt (the book was published in the UK last year but is just now coming to America); she's a well thought-of author of such histories. And I'm willing to give it the same ten page tryout that I offered the previous unannounced arrival. Just don't hold your breath for a review.

As far as why someone at Hatchette decided this was the book for me, perhaps they made an unfortunate extrapolation from the FATCR that excerpted Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Yeah, I could see that.