This morning over a cup of dark-brew Sumatra I finished logging notes from Frazer's The Golden Bough. Jotting down bits of interesting text, ideas, or references from these books is taking longer than I thought, but the end is in sight.
Or is it? The more I read the more I'm interested in, and the more I want to remember and think about next time I'm writing something, whether it's the dim glint of a noonday need-fire in ninth-century Shetland moors, or examples of wolves from Aesop's fables, or Saint-Exupery's thoughts on sacrifice.
What I've been going through recently:
Janina David, A Square of Sky (a child's experience of the Holocaust). At war's end she was asked by a clueless German woman if she was, what, sixty? Sixty-five? She was sixteen years old.
Early Irish Myths and Sagas
Earliest English Poems
Poems of the Sea
John Keay, The Gilgit Game. History of the British, Russian, and Chinese maneuverings in the western mountains of Central Asia. Startlingly poetic.
Katzanzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ.
Adam Nicolson, Seamanship. Bumbling and well-meaning author sails the British coast. From the same author who wrote Seize the Fire, a history of the battle of Trafalgar. Also startlingly poetic.
Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men.
Dave Eggers, What is the What.
Robert de Gast, Western Wind, Eastern Shore
Seven Summits
Michael Alexander, A History of Old English Literature
Fagles, trans. The Iliad
Larrington, trans. The Poetic Edda. Just listen to this: "It is time for me to ride along the blood-red roads, to set the pale horse to tread the path in the sky."
Suddenly They Heard Footsteps
Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights
Laura Miller, The Magician's Book
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Saint-Exupery, Flight to Arras
Liva Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years. Child's memoir of the Holocaust.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas. One of the most interesting and unexpected books I have ever read. Terrible and ultimately uplifting.
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Frazer, The Golden Bough
...and a few more still on deck. Whew!
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1 comment:
I'm exhausted. How do you keep them sorted out? I wanted to re-read Tale of Two Cities. What are your thoughts on that?--not re-reading it, but rather, the book itslef.
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