Mary Renault Archives - Reading the End

#BBAW: Introduce Yourself!

Published 15 Feb 2016 by Gin Jenny

The time has come! The time is now! After a few years of lying fallow, Book Blogger Appreciation Week has returned! Huge, huge thanks to my co-hosts Heather, Andi, and Ana, and thanks to everyone who’s participating. Day 1: Introduce yourself by telling us about five books that represent you as a person or your interests/lifestyle. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte I’m starting with an unoriginal one, I know! But Jane Eyre was the first book where I ever read the end before I read the middle. It gave me a taste for romance, for gothic novels, for crazypants plots where…

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Mary Renault at Shiny New Books

Published 8 Oct 2014 by Gin Jenny

As you’ve probably heard, the third issue of the wonderful Shiny New Books came out earlier this week. I was lucky enough to get to write a post about one of my favorite-ever authors, Mary Renault, for this issue. You can read the post over in their neck of the woods, and feel free to complain to me in the comments about my obvious preference for Hephaestion over Bagoas. I know that’s a point of contention FOR SOME. While you’re over there, check out the whole issue! The editors and contributors have reminded me again how much I want to…

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Review: The Charioteer, Mary Renault (plus, a giveaway)

Published 27 Sep 2013 by Gin Jenny

Since nobody loves this book (and when I say “nobody loves this book” I want you to understand that I really mean “Mumsy does not love this book and it breaks my heart”), I have decided to try once again to explain what I love so much about it. The Charioteer deals with a conflict of values, my favorite kind of conflict to read about. The three main characters, Laurie and Ralph and Andrew, are gay men living in British army hospitals in the 1940s: Laurie and Ralph because injuries prevent them returning to battle, and Andrew as an orderly…

21 Comments

Review: The Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault

Published 25 Sep 2013 by Gin Jenny

Lucky you, bloggy friends! Two guest reviews by Mumsy in such a short time! I was expecting Jenny to start Mary Renault Week by reviewing The Charioteer, a novel that (as Jenny correctly notes) only Jenny loves. And then I would have started my review by saying that Mary Renault is actually at her best when she is writing about ancient Greece, about which she appears to know Everything. (And because I find it difficult to switch tracks, I have now said just that.) The Mask of Apollo is somewhat different from most of Renault’s novels in that it features…

8 Comments

Review: The Persian Boy, Mary Renault

Published 23 Sep 2013 by Gin Jenny

For lo, this shall be Mary Renault Week on the blog! In case you missed hearing about this (not that I’ve been shrieking loudly about it or anything), Mary Renault’s books have been released in ebook format at last! And are now available for purchase wherever ebooks are sold! Thus, this week I have decreed shall be the week in which I post only about Mary Renault. If you post about her too please tell me so in the comments and I’ll add links to my posts. Today I am reviewing The Persian Boy; on Wednesday my lovely Mum will…

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Now is a good time for you to read Mary Renault

Published 3 Sep 2013 by Gin Jenny

(Also, there was never a bad time to read Mary Renault.) Almost the whole of Mary Renault’s oeuvre is being put into e-book format as of next week. !!!!!! As you may know if you have hung around this blog or reviewed Song of Achilles or spoken of Mary Renault at all in any way ever, I am a huge huge HUGE fan of hers. My lovely mother handed me Fire from Heaven when I was thirteen or so, and I have loved Mary Renault ever since then. No author I have ever read before or since has managed to…

28 Comments

The other two Mary Renault books I got from the university library

Published 11 Aug 2010 by Gin Jenny

I am always trying to think of ways to maximize my reading pleasure when an author has written more than one book. Before I realized it was futile because everyone has different tastes, I used to go on Amazon and try to figure out what a shiny new author’s least popular book was, and then I’d read that one first so it would be all improvements from that point on. This did not work at all with, for instance, Salman Rushdie. I accidentally read his most-acclaimed book first, Midnight’s Children, and when (after consulting Amazon) I tried to read what…

38 Comments

Review: Promises of Love, Mary Renault

Published 21 Jul 2010 by Gin Jenny

Obligatory pre-gushing blurb: Vivian, a nurse in between-the-wars England, meets Mic, a pathologist and the latest in a string of close friends of her flighty, unreliable brother. Though Mic initially seems interested in Vivian because of her resemblance to her brother, they soon become good friends and then lovers. I am experimenting with keeping a reading journal. I have not decided exactly what sort of thing you write down in a reading journal, but one thing it is definitely good for is saving anecdotes and quotations that I like. Then when I am done reading, I can go back and…

32 Comments

The Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault

Published 13 Dec 2009 by Gin Jenny

I have this strategy – I’ve mentioned it before – where when I really like an author, I save some of their books. I haven’t read two (2) of Salman Rushdie’s books. Martin Millar has written a number of books that I haven’t read, and I haven’t made the small effort it would take to order them used online. This is not because of any shortage of love in my heart for Martin Millar’s books. It’s because I’m saving them. I do it with rereads too. It’s been at least five years since I last read Persuasion, although (well, actually…

29 Comments

Fire from Heaven, Mary Renault

Published 19 Jul 2009 by Gin Jenny

I will preface this by saying that I can understand how you might not like Mary Renault’s writing. But I like her a lot, and this, the first of her books about Alexander the Great, is the first thing I ever read by her. It takes us from Alexander’s childhood through to Philip of Macedon’s death, and it is a damn good book. I love how Mary Renault makes silence and implication work for her: how something will happen, and you don’t think anything of it, and then the characters react in a way that makes you go back and…

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