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4 stars: loved this book, would recommend

This was a reread but it's been a long time - I remembered almost nothing of it. It is a work of historical fiction about the very early years of a woman about whom very little is known but who eventually became a saint.

I feel like I had an easier time reading it the first time though - I spent a lot of time rereading pages and flipping back to try and figure out what was going on. I didn't have a lot of trouble with the Old English words sprinkled throughout, most were clear from context, doubly so if you've read a lot of fantasy, and I think helped disconnect them from words with more modern connotations (e.g. a gesith is not exactly a knight), and it helped a lot that I had just played an online game set in a similar time period so I knew where all the kingdoms and so on were. But I found the names very hard to keep track of and if I read it again I would probably take notes as I go. There was also a lot that happened that was just sort of implied or that happened very subtlely and so I would need to read thing carefully to make sure I didn't miss anything.

Otherwise it very much covered two topics I love a lot: pre-modern intrigue and politics, and extremely detailed descriptions of daily life at the time. Religion mostly exists as an extension of politics in this book. Insofar as this is a book about the lives of women, it did better justice than most historical fiction: the descriptions of textile manufacture were, as far as I could tell, incredibly well researched, and there was a lot about how all of that was essential to the economics of Britain as a whole. It was also full of loving descriptions of nature and plants and animals, and how closely life at the time was tied to the seasons and the weather and how deadly those things could be. The novel felt much more deeply rooted in the time period where it was set than most vaguely medieval fiction.

There is also a lot of action, and violence, but often it happens in the background and is often not dwelled upon (aside frrom some specific very gory descriptions) and in fact there is one pivotal moment near the beginning where the protagonist is present but the events that occurred are never described directly and you have to infer what happened later. It is much more about the interior lives of people living in a very violent society and how they find ways to ensure their survival, rather than about battles and such. I will note that very few characters, including the protagonist, act in ways that are particularly aligned with modern notions of right and wrong.

I generally don't like the trope of a protagonist who is just super smart and figures everything out, and thought she was unrealistically young to be doing that, but I could forgive it in this case because of everything else. I am also at this point very unclear how the historical figure she is based on eventually became a saint.

Content notes: I guess anything set in this time period is contractually obligated to contain incest? Also there is sexual assault though it is dealt with more carefully than a lot of books in the genre. As well as all the bad things that happened in this time period, which was early enough that slavery was widespread.

There is in fact queer content, but it still very much in line with the likely norms of pre-Christian Britain rather than modern norms, including the fact that nobles were expected to have premarital relationships only with people with a dubious ability to meaningfully consent to such relationships. It is not really a romantic novel in any imaginable definition of the term. The protagonist is seen as lying somewhere between a female and a male social role, but this role she finds herself in is itself fairly constraining and it's not entirely clear it is one she fully chose.

A reread

I've just been playing a strategy game set in about the same time and it's weird to see the same location names come up

@graue Nothing immediately comes to mind, a lot of it I read more in my teens and it just kind of blurs together

It's not exactly the same but I liked The Bloody Chamber. Actually maybe I'm largely bored with Greek Mythology so no new take on it would seem that fresh

3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too

It was cool, it was a fun read, I feel like I've read enough like feminist takes on mythology at this point that it didn't feel incredibly new. I do like the fact that it showed a lot of Circe's life and how she changed over the course of the story, as well as her perception of events.

4 stars: loved this book, would recommend

Public domain as of this year!

It has no words, so I wasn't sure if I wanted to track it. I came across it because I was looking for books that were public domain that have interesting images to use, and so I ended up reading through it.

It's a wordless novel, the precursor to graphic novels and comic strips. Apparently this was a whole thing in the 1920s and 30s. The art style is pretty cool - extremely dramatic woodcuts, making a lot of use of unusual perspectives, dramatic facial expressions and so on - I don't know enough about art to comment on it. I think it's worth a read (?) just because it's an interesting look at the very beginning of the medium.

Edit: you can read it here, though some of the images are split across PDF pages: commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Lynd_Ward_-_God%27s_Man.pdf

I think I liked it more when I read it in high school, maybe my French was better, but still pretty good.

It's a play, based on the Greek play Antigone, though modern things like "driving fast cars" are present. I'm not putting any spoilers for that reason.

Most of the play is a dialogue between Antigone and Creon about when to do the thing you believe in. Creon argues that order must be maintained at all costs, that he is the only one who sees clearly that hard decisions must be made to maintain order, and does his best to convince Antigone to help him cover up what she'd done so he would not have to have her put to death. If the original story is a straightforward story of heroism in the face of tyranny, this raises all the questions that might come up in the real world. But what if actually dying really sucks and living is good and life is beautiful? What if you'll hurt the people you care about? What if you're scared? What if the thing you do may have no effect on the world? Is it still worth it, to say no to something you know is wrong?

And maybe more insidiously, what if your allies are sometimes shitty people, or your cause is flawed, or you can't do a great job of making a dramatic speech about why you're right? What if the average person actually hates you for the decision you've made, or maybe worse, doesn't care? What if deep down you don't totally believe in all of the symbolism behind what you're doing? What if maybe you are in fact a bit self centered and over dramatic and immature? What if it isn't actually possible for an ordinary human to maintain the narrative of a straightforward and flawless hero?

It's kind of more of an essay in disguise than a story. Most stories of this kind are about the physical courage of resisting the tyrant, and come with a satisfying conclusion where the hero wins some kind of victory and is seen as a hero even if there is a moment of tragic self-sacrifice. This is a story that kind of asks, for real though, let's talk about what this might look like in real life.

One thing that is interesting about this story is that Antigone never quite has great answers to any of Creon's well-practiced arguments. She does not, as people say, defeat Creon in the marketplace of ideas. He does successfully fill her with doubt. She still chooses to act, and, as she points out, is the only one with real agency in this play, because Creon, through his rationalizations, has long ago chosen not to have any.

An important piece of context about this play is that it was written and performed in Nazi-occupied France, under Nazi censorship.