I am not a successful writer, but I am usually a very successful reader. As I have for several years now, I intend to buy and read several books during the Write-a-thon, many of them by other Write-a-thon participants and/or this year's instructors. I also plan to re-read all the Icelandic sagas and supporting material that I first read more than forty years ago, along with a few that I missed the first time around. I've already re-read Njal's Saga and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. Next up: Egil's Saga.
I'm a retired database programmer. I have volunteered for Clarion West for more years than most of this year's class have been alive. I have mostly stepped back from Clarion West volunteering now, but I did help with testing and troubleshooting this new Write-a-thon interface. It's a little less personal than our old hand-built interface, and a whole lot less clunky. I'm still proud of what we were able to do with the tools at our disposal in the old days, but moving on to professionally-built tools is great.
I said I was going to read Egil's Saga next, but I lied. What I actually read was a section of G. Turville-Petre's Origins of Icelandic Literature in which he discussed a lost work of Ari Þorgilsson's, known only from references to it in other writers' works. I'm charmed by the space created and vacated by Þorgilsson's book. Had it not been so greatly respected by his peers, it would have vanished completely, as most books do.
After that, I read Stella Gibbons's splendid work of science fiction, Cold Comfort Farm. It was published in 1932, but it's set in the future, some time after the Anglo-Nicaraguan War of 1946. It's a future where horse-drawn buggies share the road with Ford vans, private telephones have television screens but public pay phones don't, small airplanes seem to be only slightly less common than automobiles (which are not, apparently, all that common), and the British class system is solidly and stolidly intact. None of those futuristic elements plays a large part in the book, but I am always happy to notice them.
Next up: Egil's Saga.
