Literary Notes

I read a pretty good set of historical novels recently.  It was called "The Conquest Trilogy", consisting of three novels:  Mercenaries, Warriors and Conquest all written by Jack Ludlow.  They deal with the story of the sons of Tancred deHauteville, a minor Norman noble in the generation before William the Conquerer.   The sons, most importantly William "Iron Arm", Robert "Guiscard", and Roger made their way to Southern Italy as mercenaries but eventually conquerered all of Southern Italy and Sicily.  It's a true story and a rather incredible one.   Some of their children will go on to be major leaders of the first crusade as well.    I'd give the series a big positive reccommendation.

I've started watching the SyFy series "Haven", and noticed that it says it is based on the Steven King novel "The Colorado Kid", so I read the novel to see how it hooked up.   Man,  they were using the words "based on" in the most general sort of sense. None of the weird supernatural stuff in the series has anything to do with the book.  The town in the book isn't even called Haven.  None of the major characters of the series are in the book.  I think two minor series characters are based on the 2 main guys from the book, but they really don't do much.  I don't know why they bothered trying to link the two.

If you feel like reading the bible from cover to cover some time, I'd suggest that you can probably skip the book of Leviticus.   It's all descriptions of how to perform various sorts of burnt offerings, a little bit of law, and no action.