Heigh-ho and a bottle of rum!

This is a Weekly Geeks post. I didn’t write it specifically as such, but I had it on hand and it fit one of the two themes for this week.

Dear Reader: Are there any subjects or themes or sub-genres you avoid reading about in a literary genre you otherwise like?

I have a few of these red flag subjects, and one of them is pirates, specifically pirate protagonists. Since there is actually a pirate sub-genre in the historical romance genre, which I periodically turn to when I get tired of reading mysteries and non-fiction, I come across them often. I enjoy reading about the lives of real pirates, and will pick up a book where pirates are the bad guys without a second thought, but to me pirates and privateers always invoke the image of violent murderers and robbers and therefore I have never been able to suspend my disbelief sufficiently in order to enjoy a tale in which a pirate is the hero.

I have yet to come across a pirate protagonist in a story where the piracy is neither prettified nor justified, which tells me that at least some authors feel uneasy about the subject. I somehow simply cannot bring myself to believe that a pirate can be the good guy, because the job description is, in itself, one that involves violently robbing people of their property and either taking them hostage (or even enslaving them, depending on the time period) or taking their lives in the process, which is something I can not, however much I might want to in order to enjoy a good story, reconcile with heroism.

Take a book I tried to read recently. It is the third in a historical romance trilogy taking place at the beginning of the English civil war and features three young women who find love during those tumultuous times. I had been looking forward to reading about the youngest of them, a bookish creature who is so wrapped up in a book she is reading that one day she tumbles off a cliff and into the sea. She is knocked unconscious and wakes up aboard a ship that turns out to be a pirate vessel. Cue immediate justification: they take a Spanish ship full of galley slaves and free them and give them the ship, which in reality spells out certain death of the slaves, who are all emaciated and weak and can hardly be expected to be able to or even know how to use sails or steer the ship to a safe harbour, because had the officers and seamen been allowed to live, they would immediately have taken back control of the ship. Their deaths are not explicitly stated, but a realist knows that this would be the necessary thing. Up went my red flag, the book went “bang” on the wall and I got rid of it in my next cull.

This was one of my red flags. What are some of yours?
Also, do you have a pirate book you think could change my mind about loathing pirate heroes?

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

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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