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).

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 ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

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...

Reading in Reykjavík

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