Kate Quinn

I am so head down in a new book that my blog has been sadly neglected. I was planning on a post about the top ten books I'm looking forward to in 2012, or maybe a post filled with helpful advice for the spouses of writers (on the other hand, my husband could probably write this one, starting with "When they are writing a new book, it is totally normal for `How are you?' to be answered with `Do you think anyone will notice if I move the Battle of Actium up a year?'")

So no blog post today, but I am offering a teaser line from my upcoming book "Empress of the Seven Hills" (titled "Empress of Rome" in the UK). This one comes from Chapter 1, and is spoken by the hero Vix, who some of you might remember as an obnoxious little boy in "Mistress of Rome."

"If I’d known the trouble that small-breasted off-limits patrician girl would make for me, I might have choked her to death in the middle of that atrium rather than watch her walk away."

Needless to say, he has a complicated relationship ahead of him.

Apparently a federal mandate was handed down from the White House, or possibly the Borg, to all book bloggers at the turn of the New Year: You must post a “Top Ten Books I Read in 2011” blog post, or you will be assimilated. Surrender immediately. Resistance is futile.

Who am I to resist Obama, or the Borg Queen? Here's my Top Ten List of books I've read this year (though some were published far previous to 2011). More original post coming next week, assuming I haven't been assimilated.

Best Books I Read In 2011, In No Particular Order

1.“Death of Kings” by Bernard Cornwell
Ah, the master himself with his latest installment in the Saxon Stories, a bloody and exuberant tale starring acerbic warrior hero Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Cornwell provides his usual stream of dry one-liners, battlefield heroics, and gorgeous writing – all wrapped up in one lovely package with a hero so hunky that I would time-travel back to the Dark Ages, risking an existence of dismemberment, violence, and no deodorant, for a single chance to meet him in person.

2.“The Second Duchess” by Elizabeth Loupas
The best debut I've read in a long time: a clever and level-headed Austrian princess newly married to the same Duke of Ferrara who stars in the famous Browning poem. Cautiously, the new duchess investigates the mysterious death of her predecessor while negotiating the snakepit of Renaissance politics and the attentions of her sometimes attractive, sometimes terrifying new husband. Deliciously twisty plotting, sensuous prose, and unforgettable characters.

3.“The Last Queen” by C.W. Gortner
A much sadder historical fiction read which I nevertheless devoured in a single hot summer day. The life of Juana of Castile makes for gut-wrenching reading as she travels from exuberant young princess to the woman who will be walled up and unfairly dismissed by history as a madwoman, but it's like watching a car wreck – you can't look away for a minute. Read with a large plate of Spanish tapas and a glass of sangria for consolation, preferably under the loggias of the Alhambra palace where Juana grew up.

4.“Ghost Story” by Jim Butcher
Just to prove that I don't only read historical fiction. Jim Butcher's urban fantasy series about a lanky wise-cracking wizard operating in modern-day Chicago is as addictive as crack. This one is no exception. Harry Dresden, wizard and wise-ass, is one of the best fictional heroes around – and this is one of the few books I can think of where the narrator spends pretty much the whole book dead.

5.“Song of the Nile” by Stephanie Dray
I love an unabashedly ambitious heroine, and Dray's Selene really fills the ticket – Cleopatra's intelligent daughter who does her best to claw, scheme, and manipulate the Emperor of Rome into giving back her birthright of the throne of Egypt. If only the Emperor of Rome weren't a first-class creep who wants waaaaaay more than a girl should reasonably have to give up in pursuit of power. Sequel to “Lily of the Nile,” and altogether a darker, harder, more grown-up read.

6.“Major Pettigrew's Last Stand” by Helen Simonson
A gem – if Masterpiece Theatre doesn't snap this book up for a movie remake starring Derek Jacobi, it would be a crime. A gentle but hysterically funny romance about a reticent English widower who finds himself, to his considerable inconvenience, falling in love with a charming Pakistani widow. Humorous, understanding, and sweet – and how lovely to see a passionate romance between a Romeo of sixty-eight and a Juliet of fifty-eight. As if only the young and beautiful are entitled to star in great love stories.

7.“Dance With Dragons” by George R.R. Martin
The long and not very patiently awaited installment in Martin's iconic and massive “Song of Ice and Fire” series. I won't bother recapping the plot of this thousand-page doorstopper, since your screen would explode, but it was worth every hour of sleep I lost over it.

8.“11/22/63” by Stephen King
Another doorstopper on the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, and worth every penny of the doctor's bills you will incur for the wrist strain that settled in after hours of holding this brick up close enough to read. A teacher in 2011 finds a mysterious portal that takes him back to 1958 – and he decides to stick around and see if he can't prevent the Kennedy assassination from happening. The answer may surprise you – Stephen King has not one whit lost his touch for horror, creativity, and poignancy, sometimes all in the same sentence.

9.“Mr. Rosenblum Dreams In English” by Natasha Solomons
Middle-aged Jack Rosenblum is a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany by moving his family to England - and for twenty years, Jack has devoted himself to becoming the perfect English gentleman. He has the tweed suits from Harrods, the pipe and the Jaguar, but one thing eludes him: membership to a golf club. When every good golf club rejects Jack (no Jews allowed! Germany certainly didn't corner the market on anti-Semitism) Jack decides with grandeur that he will build his own golf course. What a bad idea – and what a funny, moving, satisfying book about the results.

10.“Kitchen Confidential” by Anthony Bourdain
How to classify this book: Memoir? Expose? Humor? Its author is easier to pin down: a hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-living executive chef (and now Travel Channel star) who can't write a sentence without being funny, poignant, or offensive, often simultaneously. Bourdain's macho testosteronal voice would be unbearable if he didn't make just as much fun of himself as he does of everyone else. I can't walk into a restaurant now without wondering if the crew making my food is the kind of swaggering foul-mouthed batch of borderline psychos who are depicted so vividly in the pages here.

So there it is – my top ten list, along with everyone else's. Now please, Mr. President or Ms. Borg Queen, can I pretty please go back to my book and not be assimilated?

I love Christmas. I really do. But at some point in the holiday season (usually somewhere around December 1st) certain aspects start to grate. Take “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” - what kind of message is this song sending, telling us that popularity and happiness will only be achieved when others realize that your personal oddities are in fact useful and lucrative? Or “Frosty the Snowman.” I'll flip past it approximately 800 times on various TV channels during the holiday season. First 400 times I think he's kinda cute with the top hat and shoe-button eyes. Last 400 times I start fantasizing about running after him with a hair-dryer.

The trouble is, the Christmas season has become all sugar and no spice. For those of us who want a little bite to the holidays, here are some quick fixes. It's Christmas Day and I've got eggnog to drink, but I can offer solutions to the top three holiday offenders: music, movies, and books.

MUSIC
Is “Winter Wonderland” giving you headaches? Are you on the brink of eating a shotgun if you have to sit through one more hack version of “Jingle Bells” piped over bad speakers at the Gap? Fear not; YouTube has two clips that will have you grinning. First on the list is a sidesplitting “Winter Wonderland” parody sung impeccably by a men's choir. Let's just quote the first verse: “Lacy things the wife is missin'/Didn't ask her permission/I'm wearing her clothes, her silk pantyhose/Walkin' round in women's underwear.” Second on the list is men's a capella group Straight No Chaser, singing a seemingly straightforward “12 Days of Christmas” in which they eventually lose count of which ____ing day it is, break confusedly into other carols such as “Here We Come A Wassailing” and the Dreidel Song, and somehow end up in a Christmas-ed version of Toto's “Africa.” Bloody brilliant.

Walkin' Round In Women's Underwear

Twelve Days of Christmas


MOVIES
By now you're probably tired of the Charlie Brown Special, Frosty the Snowman, and “It's a Wonderful Life.” Try “The Ref” instead, a hilarious Christmas comedy starring Kevin Spacey, Judy Davis, and Denis Leary. Leary plays a harassed cat burglar trying to escape on Christmas Eve with the score of a lifetime, and forced to hide out in suburban Connecticut by taking a quarreling couple hostage. Trouble is, the couple can't stop fighting even when an armed man is pointing a gun at their heads, and soon the burglar is reffing the family disagreements and tearing his hair out. Priceless lines abound, but here's one for anybody with a relative they would just as soon stayed home: the quarreling couple's pathologically-bullying mother, finally held up at gunpoint by the burglar who hisses “Nobody move, or I shoot!” After which the beleagered daughter-in-law says with complete sincerity; “Go ahead, shoot her.”


BOOKS
Ah, that annual piece of Christmas torture known as Charles Dickens's “A Christmas Carol.” I am probably going to hell (or at least coming across as an incredible philistine) for saying that I hate Dickens with the fire of a thousand suns, but I make no bones about it: I can't stand his cumbersome humor, his lengthy expositions, or his absurd character names. Worst of his offenses is “A Christmas Carol,” a piece of sanctimonious treacle that was forced down my throat in some institution of learning or other, and on which I have been gagging ever since. I keeping hoping that someday Scrooge will push Tiny Tim out a high window before we can get to “God bless us every one!” but in abeyance of that miracle, I'll settle for Laura Ingalls Wilder's “On The Banks of Plum Creek.” Wilder's collection of autobiographical growing-up-on-the-frontier novels will thankfully outlast the dreadful Little House on the Prairie TV show they spawned, and Plum Creek has a particularly good Christmas segment where the heroine's father heads to town for Christmas candy to stuff his daughters' stockings, and is caught on his way back by a freak blizzard. He holes up in a snowbank for four days, surviving on the stash of candy and finally emerging alive but with no Christmas presents. The family celebrates minus presents but plus Dad: a far better Christmas message than the “Buy now, buy more!” mentality of “Let's open Walmart at midnight on Black Friday so everybody can start buying as soon as possible.”

Having sufficiently salted your holiday, I'm off to enjoy mine. Not eggnog, come to think of it. Too sweet. Try dry champagne instead, ice cold, for another holiday substitution. And Merry Christmas.

I feel like Christmas came early: not one but two wonderful blurbs for “Empress of the Seven Hills,” and from authors I adore: Michelle Moran and C.W. Gortner.


Michelle moves on from pharoahs to emperors: her upcoming book about Napoleon's various women

Disclaimer: yes, I am friends with both Michelle and Christopher. But this wasn't a backscratching arrangement among buddies. My copy of “Cleopatra's Daughter” was already well-thumbed and highly appreciated long before I met its author and discovered she was a smart and funny lady with a raucous laugh and an infinite supply of both good jokes and stunning print shifts. “Confessions of Catherine de' Medici” had already kept me up past my bedtime long before I discovered that Christopher was a first-rate dinner companion with a stream of sotto voce one-liners that would keep Oscar Wilde in stitches. It's such a relief when you meet the authors of books you love, and like the authors as much as you do their work.

I was astounded to find that both Michelle and Christopher liked my work as well – and were kind enough to read an advance copy of my next book, “Empress of the Seven Hills.” Michelle is tearing through a first draft of her new book about Napoleon's second wife, and Christopher is head down in research on the Borgias, but they both took time out of their busy schedules to write me cover blurbs. And what blurbs!

"Power and betrayal were never so addictive than in this gorgeously wrought tale of star-crossed lovers caught in the turbulent currents of Imperial Rome. Kate Quinn deftly contrasts the awesome splendor of torch-lit banquets with the thunder of the battlefield. EMPRESS OF THE SEVEN HILLS is a riveting plunge into an ancient world that is both utterly foreign and strikingly familiar - where you can feel the silken caress of an empress and the cold steel of a blade at your back."

- C.W. Gortner, bestselling author of THE CONFESSIONS OF CATHERINE DE MEDICI and THE LAST QUEEN

And:

"In her latest book, EMPRESS OF THE SEVEN HILLS, Kate Quinn outdoes herself with a story so compelling that the only complaint readers will have is that it ends. From the moment Vix and Sabina appear on the page, readers are taken on an epic adventure through Emperor Trajan's Rome. No other author brings the ancient world alive like Quinn - if there's one book you read this year, let it be this one!"

- Michelle Moran, bestselling author of CLEOPATRA'S DAUGHTER and MADAME TUSSAUD

Wow – that's all I've got to say. They make me want to run out and buy a copy of the book, and I already know how it ends. Michelle, Christopher – thank you both! Drinks on me the next time I see you.

Today is the day I turn thirty – yes, the big 3-0. According to everything I've read, I should be having a nervous breakdown at the prospect of turning older. But that hasn't happened yet: frankly I can't wait to get older so I can turn into one of those terrifying sharp-tongued dowagers like Maggie Smith in "Downton Abbey," or Judy Dench as M. Instead of getting depressed I've gotten speculative. Turning 30 means one thing to a woman in the 21st century – what did it mean in centuries past? What would it mean if I'd been born in the fifth century, or the fifteenth? Keeping that in mind, I cranked my memory back to those birthdays I might have had in some very different eras of history.

B.C. 2542, Egypt
I'm a priest's daughter in a small Egyptian village by the Nile. I spend my 30th birthday having my brains pulled out through my nose with a hook, because I'm dead: a small accident involving a block of sandstone and the local quarry supplying the building of the pyramids at nearby Giza. My father didn't have enough money to get me married, but he does scrape up enough to get me mummified, so I spend the day getting my internal organs yanked out before I can be salted, resined, and wrapped. I didn't even get to see the first level of the pyramids go up, either.

B.C. 321, Athens
I'm a wool merchant's wife, and I spend my thirtieth birthday just like I spent the twenty-ninth, and the twenty-eighth, and in fact every birthday since my fourth: weaving. That's all well-born Greek women do, you see. My husband is going to a symposium this evening, and he gets to talk philosphy with Aristotle, but do I get to go? Nope, I'm stuck in the back room with my mother-in-law, my two unmarried sisters-in-law, and my three daughters, all of us sitting at those damn looms till we die. Age of Enlightenment, my ass.

A.D. 70, Rome
I'm a senator's wife in ancient Rome under Emperor Vespasian – or rather, I'm currently a senator's wife. He's my fourth husband; I married the first at sixteen, divorced him when he lost all his money investing in silver mines in Britannia under Emperor Claudius, remarried a wine trader who got exiled for plotting against Emperor Nero, divorced again, married a praetor who lost his head under Emperor Otho. Hopefully this husband lasts longer than the first three: he's already given me a very nice emerald necklace for a birthday present, and if I let slip that I know just how many of the slave girls he's sleeping with, I can probably get a pair of bracelets out of him too!

499, Dumnonia
At age thirty in the Dark Ages, I'm dead again. I've been dead for two years, actually: married at thirteen to a fisherman, pumping out six children and five more miscarriages, losing most of my teeth by twenty-one, and finally dying at twenty-eight when my seventh child comes out backward and rips me apart in the process after forty-six hours of excruciating labor. Happy birthday to me!

1066, Senlac Hill, England
Not a great birthday this time either. I'm a Saxon warrior's wife, and I've managed to survive the birth of four children and the bout of fever that carried off three of them. But the Norman invasion just about does me in: my husband dies in the Battle of Hastings, and I get raped afterward by three Norman knights who frankly smell like French pigs. But one of them is nice enough to me afterward, gives me a gold chain and marries me a year later. I've got a daughter to raise, not to mention the coming baby fathered by one of the three French pigs, so I settle down to my new life with a shrug. The Normans are clearly here to stay, so a girl might as well get used to it.

1488, Republic of Venice
My thirtieth birthday marks a tremendous occasion: I'm a grandmother! My eldest daughter is fifteen, the same age I was when I birthed her, and she's just given me my first grandchild. Only a girl, but at least a healthy one, and my daughter came through the birth easy as pie. (She gets those hips from me; I squeezed out eight babies and never lost a one!) I'm bustling off to the Basilica San Marco to light a candle in thanks, and another candle to make sure she gets a boy next time.

1789, Paris
It's not till after the riot that I remember it's my birthday. It all started fairly low key; a lot of grumbling in the marketplace about how expensive bread was getting. I really couldn't tell you how I ended up with a pike on my shoulder, marching to Versailles with a lot of other women to go talk to the King. But I have to say, it was thrilling! My husband belongs to the Jacobin club, so he was proud as punch when I came roaring back into Paris with a mob of thousands, bearing King Louis in my wake. And now that I've seen the King in person, I can tell you I'm not impressed. Weak chin, and can you really respect a man who lets a lot of baker's wives drag him out of his own palace? Really, I don't see why we need a King in France at all.

1894, New York
Thank goodness I've turned thirty at last – in the Gilded Age, you simply aren't taken seriously as a hostess until you've got a little experience under your belt. My husband (railway magnate; lights cigars with $100 bills along with Cornelius Vanderbilt and all that crowd) celebrates the occasion by giving me a quadruple-strand pearl necklace worth $23,000 dollars – I'll wear it at the opera tonight with my latest Worth dress. No searching in the mirror for crow's feet for me; everyone knows a woman in her thirties is just hitting her prime. As Oscar Wilde put it, “London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.” And I do aim to crack London society someday – my eldest daughter is only four, but I'm grooming her for a London season and a ducal husband.

1913, London
I spend my thirtieth birthday handcuffed to the railing of 10 Downing Street, shouting “Votes For Women!” at the Prime Minister. I knock the helmet off the policeman who comes to restrain me, and wave to all my friends as I'm hauled away in the Black Maria. Fortunately I don't have a husband to pay bail, so I'm free to spend my birthday evening throwing my food out the window of my cell in Holloway Prison, and going on hunger strike. I'm in good company: Emmeline Pankhurst and Alice Paul, I hear, are in the cell next door. We're BFFs forever: there's no bond like force-feeding, prison beatings, and civil protest!

2011, Maryland
And finally, my current birthday: curled up on the couch listening to Dvorak serenades, a little black dog at my feet nagging for his walk, a bottle of champagne chilling in the refridgerator, a chapter of my new book pestering the back of my mind to be written, lots of “Happy Birthday!” Facebook posts and a bouquet of stargazer lilies from my husband. I think I'll take this birthday over any of the other ones. Okay, maybe a thirtieth birthday spent in a Worth dress and a $23,000 pearl necklace in Gilded Age New York is tempting. But overall, I'd say women in the 21st century have a lot to be thankful for on their thirtieth birthdays. Sure, maybe you're starting to get crow's feet. But look on the bright side: you probably aren't a grandmother. You probably haven't been haven't lost your teeth due to malnutrition, your health due to pumping out eight children in eight years, or your life due to repeated gang rape by enemy warriors. You aren't stuck in a back room weaving till you die, you can choose your own husband, and you have the right to vote.

Don't fear thirty. Celebrate it – you've got lots to celebrate. Thirty in the 21st century is pretty goddamn good.

Well, this is a nice surprise: halfway through researching my next book and trying not to rip all the hair out of my head, I receive the official, finalized UK cover for my third book! And may I say, it is GORGEOUS.

Please note that the UK publication of "Empress of the Seven Hills" has a different title: "Empress of Rome." Same book, two titles - so please don't buy "Empress of the Seven Hills" and "Empress of Rome" thinking they are two different books! It was a marketing decision made in-house by my publishers - if it had been left up to me, this book would probably still be called "Rome Book 3" because I am terrible at titles.

Call it "Empress of the Seven Hills" or "Empress of Rome," my third book is a sequel to "Mistress of Rome." My US cover features Vix and Sabina, who you may remember as children from "Mistress of Rome," now all grown up and having adventures of their own. My UK cover here just features Sabina. I love both, and hope you will too.