Graves' prose is great. I agree.

It's his content that I didn't like.

Me too.

Sounds refreshing.

I love this quote:

>“Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.”

>― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

If you browsed my bookshelves, you'd find proof of that.

As you age, your tastes change. You'll likely still keep a few old favorites that you reread. But you'll leave the rest behind.

EDIT: You might try historical fiction. Still fiction, but ones that accurately portray a very different point in time. Honestly, I've learned more about history from reading fiction than I have from reading history books.

Here's a family tree.

That should help you get the relationships straight.

Looks like a number of people do. So far it's got unanimous approval on this thread.

No, only Graves I've read are the two Claudius books. And read those because the adaptation was so great that I wanted to read the source material.

No thanks. Claudius the God was more tedious than I care to experience again in pleasure reading. Don't need more. But if Graves wrote more books like I, Claudius that could be something I'd be interested in.

Never watched The Sopranos. Just scrolled through the cast list:

Livia -- evil matriarch who would do anything to put her blood in power. Does that seem like Livia Soprano?

I can't decide if The Princess Bride or The NeverEnding Story is the epitome of it. Call it a tie.

I loved when Star Trek started doing there own version of that with the holodecks.

EDIT: Watership Down. How could I have forgotten that one?

Glad you did. Wish I did. But after this second reading I am quite sure that I don't.

Sad to say that I didn't know he was a poet. If he weren't the writer of I, Claudius --- and had BBC not done that adaptation --- I doubt I'd even know of him.

Could be. In which case I wish that he'd put it in a separate book called I, Herod. Because, for me, all it does it clutter up the second book.

I'll have to Google King Jesus.

The adaptation was fantastic.

Small scale as it's almost all filmed on sets. No crowd scenes. But the acting is the absolute best of British theater acting and the writing is superb. Streamlined from the books as it always has to be. But all the important stuff is there. That they could adapt Claudius the God in only three episodes tells you everything you need to know about how much important stuff was in the book.

Quite honestly, I'd say for the casual reader who enjoyed the first book to skip the second book and just watch the last three episodes of the adaptation if you want to know what happens in it.

Sounds more like possums.

How do you feel about other invasive species? Like the most damaging invasive species on the planet....Homo sapiens. That species is only native to southern Africa.

I used live traps. It was easy to catch the mice. I took them out to a field and released them. Caught dozens of them. And eventually took care of the problem.

But the rats (which came after the mice problem was over) were too smart for their own good. I only managed to catch one juvenile rat...who I watered, fed and released. I even put fried chicken in the trap and couldn't catch them.

Finally put poison down and hated doing it when I saw the blood trail one rat left behind dragging themself across the garage.

Happily a cat came into my life. The cat didn't hunt the rats. But the rats must have smelled the cat and decided not to move in for the winter (which is when they'd come into the attic).

Based on how tattered it is from all the rereads, it has to be The Stand by Stephen King.

Though the absolute scariest thing I've read in my adult life is the short story Kaddish by Whitley Strieber in the horror anthology Dark Delicacies.

The Shining's tough because of Danny's extreme youth. Poor kid.

In the miniseries which was written by Stephen King, King takes out one of my favorite images: Where the Overlook embodied in Jack spins the wheel of the boiler --- the hot metal sinking into the palms of his hands and setting them on fire --- and when the gauge goes down, it shuffles in a victory dance with its flaming hands waving above its head.

Instead King replaces that with a scene where Jack takes back control of himself one final time as he stands in front of the boiler and deliberately refuses to spin the wheel to release the pressure and so makes the decision to blow up the Overlook.

Oh, you read it as an audiobook.

Well, all audiobooks are boring and torturous to me. The last thing I want would be to slow my reading down by a factor of 5 at least.

I'm going to have to reread. I don't recall it being that boring.

Mostly I recall the powerful imagery he drew in key scenes. That and being offended by that caricature of a Texan which I guess he >!threw on the altar because he had to off somebody to give the ending more meaning.!<

And now you know why it's my favorite of the core 5 books.

Next time you re-read LotR, you'll understand so many references that you didn't understand before.