![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 13th, 2022 07:29 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
T. H. White’s The Goshawk, a memoir of White’s time training his first goshawk, Gos, not long before the beginning of World War II. He doesn’t mention this, but it’s also right around the time that he wrote the first three books of The Once and Future King, and the whole Might vs. Right thing is very much on his mind as he trains Gos and grimly contemplates the war that everyone already knows is coming. (He published the book long after the war but I believe these observations are original: the gloomy "We're all gonna die and/or descend into barbarism" note has a lot in common with for instance Orwell's pre-World War II writing about the coming conflict.)
About halfway through the book,
( spoilers )
What I’m Reading Now
Continuing my Arthurian journey with Elizabeth Wein’s The Winter Prince, the first book in her Aksumite quartet! (Should I start an Arthuriana tag?) I have been warned that, in classic Arthurian fashion, this book has incest vibes, which the rest of the series will spend trying to live down. Currently my money is on Medraut/his half-brother Lleu (beautiful! Frail! sickly!) but it could be Medraut/Goewin, Lleu’s heartier twin sister who keeps tiptoeing into Medraut’s room to wake him up when he has horrible nightmares about his godmother Morgause, who did something undisclosed but horrible that might ALSO be incest (because isn’t Morgause Medraut [Mordred]’s real mother?).
But also Medraut appears to be writing the book to Morgause as a letter, so who knows.
What I Plan to Read Next
My interlibrary loan on D. E. Stevenson’s Music in the Hills has arrived!
T. H. White’s The Goshawk, a memoir of White’s time training his first goshawk, Gos, not long before the beginning of World War II. He doesn’t mention this, but it’s also right around the time that he wrote the first three books of The Once and Future King, and the whole Might vs. Right thing is very much on his mind as he trains Gos and grimly contemplates the war that everyone already knows is coming. (He published the book long after the war but I believe these observations are original: the gloomy "We're all gonna die and/or descend into barbarism" note has a lot in common with for instance Orwell's pre-World War II writing about the coming conflict.)
About halfway through the book,
( spoilers )What I’m Reading Now
Continuing my Arthurian journey with Elizabeth Wein’s The Winter Prince, the first book in her Aksumite quartet! (Should I start an Arthuriana tag?) I have been warned that, in classic Arthurian fashion, this book has incest vibes, which the rest of the series will spend trying to live down. Currently my money is on Medraut/his half-brother Lleu (beautiful! Frail! sickly!) but it could be Medraut/Goewin, Lleu’s heartier twin sister who keeps tiptoeing into Medraut’s room to wake him up when he has horrible nightmares about his godmother Morgause, who did something undisclosed but horrible that might ALSO be incest (because isn’t Morgause Medraut [Mordred]’s real mother?).
But also Medraut appears to be writing the book to Morgause as a letter, so who knows.
What I Plan to Read Next
My interlibrary loan on D. E. Stevenson’s Music in the Hills has arrived!
