Skip to main content

Booking through Thursday


 Today's Booking through Thursday is a about somewhat sensitive subject, especially for non-Americans:

So, Fourth of July here in the USA … Do you ever read books that could be considered patriotic? Rousing stories of heroes? History? Brave countrymen & women doing bold things?
What would you recommend if somebody asked you for something patriotic–no matter what your country?
Be as specific or as general as you like?


There aren‘t many novels of this kind available in my language (there are some, but they tend to be maudlin and I don‘t like maudlin). There is more available in the non-fiction field, but history books here mostly tend to focus on social aspects rather than on glorifying the country.

Icelanders as a tribe are a rather cynical and deprecating lot and on the occasions when it doesn‘t show in our writing it comes out in the reading instead. You will find plenty of stories of individual heroes in Icelandic literature, e.g. in the Sagas, but not much prose which I would call wholly patriotic in the "heroic glory of our nation" mould. The only glorious "heroes of our country" I can think of right now who are generally not criticised are handball player Ólafur Stefánsson and the Saga hero Gunnar of Hlíðarendi (from Njáls saga). However, if you read the Wikipedia entry on Gunnar, you will find the aforesaid cynicism at work even there (especially in the final sentence of the entry).

We tend, when being patriotic in all seriousness, to praise the natural beauty of our island, the beauty of our women and the physical prowess of our men, the purity of everything from wool to water and the ways in which we are better than other nations when looked at through the „per capita“ filter. I find this kind of discussion tends to be jingoistic in nature which is why I tend to eschew the issue.

Traditional literary patriotism is mostly found in our poetry, especially poems and verses written during the era of the 19th and 20th centuries when Icelanders were campaigning, first for autonomy and then for independence.

What I would recommend, therefore, is poetry, especially the rousing "I love my country" and "why you should love your country" poems from the second half of the 19th century up to independence (1944).

Comments

Kristin A. said…
Sounds like you just show your patriotism a different way which is still OK. I understand we Americans tend to be er very in your face with ours at times.

My BTT: http://bloodsweatandbooks.blogspot.com/2013/07/booking-through-thursday-33-patriotism.html
Unknown said…
What a very interesting take on patriotism. :)


Andrea K. @ Books and Bindings
Booking Through Thursday
Vilia said…
Could the Vinland sagas be classed as patriotic? Icelanders bravely exploring the unknown. I went for fiction with my post http://backchattingbooks.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/booking-through-thursday-patriotism
Bibliophile said…
Kristin, I couldn't post a comment on you post because I am not on Discus and it seems it is impossible to comment without being registered (to which I strongly object), but I wanted to say that I sometimes envy Americans for being able to unreservedly express their love for their country without it being taken the wrong way by their compatriots. For a European to express patriotic views in the American style is liable to lead to a suspicion of being at best a jingoist and at worst a neo-Nazi. We tend to express patriotism more subtly and avoid superlatives, but it's there if you know where to look.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme