Books are my total mood boosters! The past few months have been a blur of hectic schedules, stress eating and quarter life crisis-ing (mostly because I want it ALL in one time and it irks me that the Universe is adamant on teaching me a little something about patience) but I get by through a lot of rallying, dreaming and purchasing. The last great book I read was The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich a few weeks ago (in the middle of tests and all, but I roll like that. I am a masterclass in prioritizing the most trivial things). I got hooked on Mark Zuckerberg and his information-privy empire. People like the Zuck are so inspiring and of course, stories like this (manifested in shows and books) make us forget about the boring daily grind.
This week, I have been dying to watch The Borgias, a new show from Showtime US about this prominent Spanish renaissance family who came to power in Rome. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who's got a love for shows about deceit, sex, money, religion and power plays in old world affairs. Cesare Borgia inspired Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, Lucrezia Borgia had an incestuous reputation, Pope Alexander VI's ascent to papacy was as infamous as the corruption that happened while he was Pope. God, this show has so much material to work with! Anyway, the Secret seems to be at work today because as soon as I got home from work, I found a lovely surprise...
Lucrezia Borgia, on hearing that her father, Pope Alexander VI, was choosing her third husband, noted that her first two had been “very unlucky.” Luck had little to do with it, as Hibbert shows in this vivid chronicle of the notoriously corrupt Renaissance family. One husband was killed on the orders of her brother Cesare, whose ruthlessness made him the model for Machiavelli’s “The Prince”; the other was discarded after ceasing to be politically useful to the Pope. Hibbert ably traces the web of alliances through which the Spanish-born Alexander hoped to secure his hold on Italy and his family’s place in power. But his prose often demonstrates the costume-drama pitfalls of popular history: too little analysis and too many “almond pastries filled with honey and nougat,” which Lucrezia ate “in the steaming water of her bath or while playing idly with her countless pearls.” - from The New Yorker
It's kind of exciting that I happen to be in possession of a book on this show I have been so interested to watch. I will be the first one to admit that I don't know much about the Borgias (I have the bloody Tudors of England and their "religious" wars to blame!) so imagine my excitement when, upon checking my bookshelf, I find out one of the books my grandmother sent me from New York was about this family! Aaaah! It's the little things that make me extremely happy (that and the fact that with school ending in a week, I can finally have a break from juggling work and graduate studies!). :)
Hope you're also discovering small surprises this weekend. I love weekends!
