A Guide to Samuel Pepys' Reformation England

Pepys' Diaries have long been in my "to read" pile. I admit they have always intimidated me, for some obscure, irrational reason. Samuel Pepys was a civil servant, man about town, knowledge lover (in fact, a founding member of the Royal Society), pleasure seeker and able maneuverer of intrigues. He also kept a detailed diary through out his life, which spanned the end of Cromwell's Protectorate, the Reformation, the Great Fire of London and even saw William of Orange land in England. How is that for an accomplished and interesting man?

Geoffrey Trease writes a simple, straightforward introduction to the Diaries. He shows both the great historical events and the small, everyday situations Pepys faced, placing him both as an important public person and a petty man. Most of all, he shows us how human Pepys is and how honest his writing.

I now have a much better view of the world the Diaries fit into and a good context for Pepys and many of the people around him. I feel much more confident to tackle the Diaries themselves.

Note - you can download this book on a Kindle for free: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samuel-Pepys-World-Geoffrey-Trease/dp/0500130361 I imagine there are other free sources as well.

Samuel Pepys Diaries themselves are looong out of copyright and can be downloaded from several places.

Want to journal?

I never managed to keep a journal or diary. I always wanted to write something beautiful, profound and inspired. In other words, there were a lot of blank pages. This book caught my eye exactly because it was the opposite of all my previous attempts.

Extraordinary Ordinary Moments, by Jorey Hurley, celebrates the small things in life, those mundane but perfect moments that we often look over. Each page has a prompt, ranging from "something you carry with you" to "something with potential," and a drawing, which may or may not be relevant or inspiring. The rest of the page is left blank, to allow writing, drawing, collage or any other interpretation of the prompt. The book is large and opens flat, making it easy to use, and the pages are nice and thick.

As always, some of the prompts were interesting and relevant to me. Others, not as much, tending to the cliche and trite. Perhaps I'll see those as an interesting challenge when I get there. Perhaps I'll decide to skip that page. Hey, it's my journal, I can do what I like! Overall, I believe it will be a useful guide for my journaling experiment. The drawings, however, are somewhat too cutesy for my taste. After a while, they started to annoy me.

In exchange for an honest review, Blogging for Books had provided me with a complimentary copy of this journal.