What Am I Reading Wednesday - September 3

I am so, so behind on ::flaps hands:: everything...but that still hasn't stopped me from spending hours each day reading books, and then even more hours writing about them.

What I Finished Reading This Week

The Chosen Queen – Sam Davey
This novel is an Arthurian retelling from Igraine's perspective. ( Boy, did I have Thoughts. )

But the utterly maddening thing is, 80 percent of this book was good enough that, when the next volume in Davey's "Pendragon Prophecy" comes out in a couple of years, I will probably read it despite knowing better.

Kindling The Celtic Spirit – Mara Freeman
Kindling The Celtic Spirit was published during the heyday of the shopping mall new age/occult publishing boom. In those pre-Wikipedia, pre-Internet dark ages, it and its ilk served a valuable purpose, making accessible information from niche, out of print, and otherwise inaccessible primary and secondary sources on Celtic folklore and belief from the proto-, early, and early modern historical periods, albeit mixed in with liberal amounts of neopagan accretions.

There's much less need for such things in our current existence of commercial ebook and ejournal publishing, Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, and museum and historic trust youtube documentaries, but there's something naively charming about the book's mix of academic fact and invented tradition and ritual. And while for some reason The Festival of Lughnasa has yet to be republished (unlike its brethren (Carmina Gadelica and The Silver Bough), there are plenty of references and and quotations from it here.


What I Am Currently Reading

Song Of The Huntress – Lucy Holland
I needed a palette cleanser after The Chosen Queen.


What I'm Reading Next

This week I acquired Sistersong by Lucy Holland and Buried Deep And Other Stories by Naomi Novik


これで以上です。