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hawkwing_lbBooks 2009: 82-83
82. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising.
The second book of Cooper's justly famous "The Dark is Rising" sequence. I read this as a child, and was impressed. Some of the passages still make the hair rise on the back of my neck.
This is the story of how eleven-year-old Will discovers the power to which he was born, the long-running war between the Light and the Dark, and seeks the six signs of the Old Ones which will help turn back the rising of the Dark. It's told with an ear for rhythm and resonance and an eye for landscape and place: this is very much an English story in the Arthurian tradition, but it is not defined by the myths to which it alludes with both grace and power.
I really need to get my hands on the collected five-book volume, some day.
non-fiction
83. Xenophon, A History of My Times, Penguin Classics, London, 1966, trans. Rex Warner.
I know a hell of a lot more about the mechanics of how Greek armies behaved and made war in the first half of the fourth century BCE than I did when I started reading this. Likewise Greek cities and Greek statesmen. But Xenophon is a memoirist, not a historian, and on the whole this is an uneven and significantly biased account of campaigns, personalities, treaties, and politics between the end of the Pelopponesian Wars and the Theban invasion of the Pelopponese.
Still, Xenophon is an awful lot more readable than many of the historians, and those pieces of battles and army behaviour he does choose to describe provide a contemporary soldier's insight, and are thus rather invaluable.
I spent most of my day in the library, struggling towards thesis. But this evening I was treated to a seminar on excavations at Amheida and the Dakhla oasis in Egypt, given by Roger Bagnall himself. Fascinating stuff, absolutely riveting.
I only wish I could be part of that sort of project.
82. Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising.
The second book of Cooper's justly famous "The Dark is Rising" sequence. I read this as a child, and was impressed. Some of the passages still make the hair rise on the back of my neck.
This is the story of how eleven-year-old Will discovers the power to which he was born, the long-running war between the Light and the Dark, and seeks the six signs of the Old Ones which will help turn back the rising of the Dark. It's told with an ear for rhythm and resonance and an eye for landscape and place: this is very much an English story in the Arthurian tradition, but it is not defined by the myths to which it alludes with both grace and power.
I really need to get my hands on the collected five-book volume, some day.
non-fiction
83. Xenophon, A History of My Times, Penguin Classics, London, 1966, trans. Rex Warner.
I know a hell of a lot more about the mechanics of how Greek armies behaved and made war in the first half of the fourth century BCE than I did when I started reading this. Likewise Greek cities and Greek statesmen. But Xenophon is a memoirist, not a historian, and on the whole this is an uneven and significantly biased account of campaigns, personalities, treaties, and politics between the end of the Pelopponesian Wars and the Theban invasion of the Pelopponese.
Still, Xenophon is an awful lot more readable than many of the historians, and those pieces of battles and army behaviour he does choose to describe provide a contemporary soldier's insight, and are thus rather invaluable.
I spent most of my day in the library, struggling towards thesis. But this evening I was treated to a seminar on excavations at Amheida and the Dakhla oasis in Egypt, given by Roger Bagnall himself. Fascinating stuff, absolutely riveting.
I only wish I could be part of that sort of project.
