“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil...
Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.” -Ann Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Here's a quick summary of the more notable things I've read this last quarter of 2022 (crazy, right? My mind still thinks it's 2020). Starting with my favorite:
Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice): I cannot, cannot, cannot freakin' stress how masterfully written Interview with the Vampire is. It's everything anyone could want from a vampire book. Dark, moody, violent, it was published in 1976, just at the start (if not a little before) of the contemporary goth movement in the 1980s.
Louis is definitely my favorite vampire of all time. Course, I still have the rest of the Vampire Chronicles to devour :)
The Last Pendragon (Robert Rice): I'm going to be honest--I picked up this book because it was directly adjacent to a book I was searching for by Anne Rice. Reading legends of Camelot has been in the background of my to-do list. As should be noted, Robert Rice's work was published in 1991, so it's a more modern interpretation of the aftermath of King Arthur's death.
I haven't finished it yet, but the prologue had me so captivated I nearly missed out on Christmas dinner freefalling chapter after chapter. It's a beautiful, descriptive, historical fiction work. Rice understands his source material exceedingly--his love of the legend shines through. If you've ever seen my Read List on Goodreads, the history and works of Britain between the 600 and 1400s AD has been a sleeper genre I'm secretly in love with. The Last Pendragon hits me with just the right mood, like a shot of Licor 43.
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (J.R.R. Tolkein): Before Tolkein wrote his famous Middle Earth fantasies, he was a professor and fellow of Anglo-Saxon studies at Pembroke College. It hasn't been since early college that I've read translations of Beowulf, so I don't have much to compare Tolkein's translations to. The Translation and Commentary is one of those books where the translation of the work itself is nearly less than a quarter of the book, with the introduction and notes dominating the page count.
Still, I enjoyed both the actual translation and the notes on Tolkein's word choices/style in his translation. Maybe it's just me that finds boring academic stuff thrilling.
Reading Tolkein's translation, alongside the Norse Poetic Edda, is like looking into the backstages of Tolkein's fantasy productions. The name of Middle Earth has origins in Edda's "Midgarth," which happens to translate to, y'know, Middle Earth.
Massive side tangent--there's so many people out there who'll egg you on to read the Simarillion for an expanded view of Tolkein's writing. Yet, honestly, I think Tolkein's translations and commentaries on various historical works should be considered, too.
A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (Marc Morris): Okay, okay, it's probably boring to confess that one of my favorite authors strictly does historian works (sans hobbits). But Marc Morris reminds me of an English professor I had in college who had to go through the painstaking task of teaching us Puritan History without half of us dozing off--by taking what looked like the blandest historical account and uncovering the sheer craziness going on behind the scenes.
Marc Morris' book on the Norman Conquest/William the Conqueror continues to be my favorite book by him, but this one comes in at a tight second. Morris includes his sources, dives into fun family conflicts unique to royalty (bloody wars included), and the political machinations involved in church building.
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