BookMeme!

[lwood]

I chose to take a meme-spear cast by wodandis on this one--as I don't feel compelled to post when memes say so, neither do I enforce it from here.

SO! The rules guidelines, with a couple mutations:

1. Pick up the book nearest to you (no fishing).


2. Instead of all that "one page, some sentences" stuff, find a small clutch of sentences that, taken as a quote, are exemplary of why this book is cool to you.


3. Explain why you're reading this book.

And my answers:

1. The book: The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in 19^th-Century Britain, by Andrew Wawn.


2. A fat excerpt:

   What's in a Title?
   
   In many ways, the Victorians invented the Vikings. The word itself, in its modern incarnation, is not recorded in the OED until just thirty years before the young Princess Victoria's coronation¹; and by 1837 only a handful of her most scholarly subjects had begun to acquaint themselves with those Anglo-Saxon texts in which the term had previously been recorded. Yet, within fifty years, the word "Viking" was to be found on dozens of title-pages...written for all conditions of men, some conditions of women, and quite a few conditions of children.
   
   The ubiquity of the term "Viking" masks a wide variety of constructions of Vikingism: the old northern are variously buccaneering, triumphalist, defiant, confused, disillusioned, unbiddable, disciplined, elaborately pagan, austerely pious, relentlessly jolly, or self-destructivtly sybaritic. They are merchant adventurers, mercenary soldiers, pioneering colonists, pitiless raiders, self-sufficient farmers, cutting-edge naval technologists, primitive democrats, psychopathic berserks, ardent lovers and complicated poets.... In wrestling with this problem, and more generally in their reconstructions of the Viking-age world, Victorian enthusiasts gave birth to some strange old northern progeny. There was rarely a dull moment in this nineteenth-century marriage of Mercury and Philology.



3. I'm reading this because:
   On a little-known (we like it that way) Ásatrú mailing list, one of the more vocal (if occasionally caustic) members thinks this book should be on every heathen's shelf--and after a scant few dozen pages, I'm already inclined to agree. Expect a full review in an upcoming Idunna, complete with some of the usual comments that "Wawn's style is engaging enough to make this a pleasantly accessible read".

-- Lorrie

Comments

[ivy]

But the book closest to me is not cool to me at all! It's dreadful, but I finish most books that I start (unlike my projects).

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Then pick the one that's closest to your heart and mind instead of your person.

Look! Flexible syntax! Bane of programmers, boon of the shifty-minded...

-- Lorrie

[keristor.livejournal.com]

The book nearest to me happens to be John K. Ousterhout's Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, which I'm not reading at all (I brought it in for a cow-orker who was thinking about looking at Tcl/Tk) and have only used as a reference (and that around a decade ago).

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Then choose something nearer to your heart? ;)

-- Lorrie

[hazelkate.livejournal.com]

The book closest to me is HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynn Robinson. I read this book long ago. My girls have read it too and we each own a copy, along with three or four other books (such as Life without Water by Nancy Peacock).

I'll post this on my journal.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Great!

-- Lorrie

[faeryl.livejournal.com]

Funny that. :-) Daniel and I were discussing just this morning about how some of the older mythology books out there really over-romanticize(and hence distort) the stories.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Oh, I knew it, but lack the scholarly bona fides to smack people about the head and shoulders with my knowing of that thing.

You know, NOT THAT THAT STOPS ME, but now I have a melee weapon for to help me. 8-)

-- Lorrie