Yet more books

I'm feeling seriously rough today - swimming didn't help - and I've got a big pile of marking to do. Or rather, I should have, but 18 essays are mysteriously missing in the bureaucracy. Brilliant.

I got another book in the post today - Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian Romances. Unfortunately, I discover that it's a rather archaic 1914 translation and that I already have this copy. The up side is that the new copy is a rather pretty hardback. I'm also reading Team of Rivals by Doris Stearns Goodwin, who got into trouble for plagiarism in her The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds a few years back. The new book is astonishing - tracing the parallel careers of Lincoln and the rivals he integrated into his cabinet. It's astonishing partly because Lincoln's rivals (Chase, Bates, Salmon) were brilliant, committed, serious - how times change - and because Lincoln's elevation from desperate squalor to President was aided by luck so many times. According to my copy, Obama used it as a template for his cabinet.

The Reading List

According to the Guardian (though I can't find the link right now), Obama is preparing for office by reading Lincoln, but the journalist was rather slapdash and didn't specify whether this was a biography of the scourge of the natives (AL fought them in the Black Hawk War of 1832) of Gore Vidal's wonderful novel of the same name. I hope it's the latter - GV knows the White House inside and out, having been friends of sorts with the Kennedys and related to Al Gore. If anyone knows how to get Washington going, it's the grand old man of waspish letters. 

See him destroy David Dimbleby without effort on Election Night.