Reddit reviews The Borgias: The Hidden History

I've been struggling a bit the last week or so- I'm a huge fan of history, and I've been in the mood to read it lately. I started The Borgias: The Hidden History by G.J. Meyer as I've always known that I should read more about the Borgias, and got about 2/3 of the way through it before finally acknowledging that I'm just not that interested in historical Italian politics. Lots of fun facts about the early modern papacy, and its politics, as well as some very interesting personages, but I just couldn't get into it for some reason.

Then I read Serving Queen Victoria: Life in the Royal Household, which is very well done- great, original research and sources, wonderful individual personalities, and a very different look at Queen Victoria. But it's a bit excruciating to read- you've got all of these wonderful personalities, living incredibly boring lives, centred around a self-absorbed, uneducated, fairly crazy, ultimately 'bad' queen. It was a very good book, but damn, am I glad that I wasn't born in Victorian England.

I think that I'll go for something a bit different for the moment- right now it's between This Book is Full of Spiders, Sacre Bleu, or starting The Culture series.

While watching the Showtime series 'The Borgias' I got an interest in this period of Italian history. Pope Alexander and his brood, Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Machiavelli, the Medici. I knew enough that i could not trust any of what was being dramatized in that series (or in "Borgia" the later European series shown on Netflix that I watched later) as being historically accurate but I didn't know what I couldn't trust. Very frustrating.

So I read "The Borgias And Their Enemies" (more or less orthodox history), "The Borgias: The Hidden History" (very revisionist history, more or less endorsing the very sympathetic portrayals in the TV series), "The House of Medici: Its Rise And Fall" and I torrented a PDF copy of 'A Journey Into Michelangelo's Rome." As someone with just a casual interest in that time and place and no previous academic background in either, I would recommend all of them.

Because it shares a name with a TV show, allow me to link directly to a book that shows how this, like many stories about the Borgias, are probably myths:

http://www.amazon.com/Borgias-Hidden-History-G-J-Meyer/dp/0345526910/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376978498&sr=1-3&keywords=borgias

While also managing to be incredibly salacious in its own right. Check it out and I guarantee you'll have half a dozen TIL posts in the first few chapters.