Then and Now #54 (25/9/23 - 1/10/23)

Happy Sunday!  The Sunday Post is a blog news meme hosted @ Caffeinated Reviewer. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme. Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week.  It is hosted weekly over at Mailbox Monday and every Friday they do a round-up of some of their favourite, shared reads! 

Last Week

It's officially October, which is nonsense. But I'm also oddly excited about it being the first of October because it officially marks a year of me working on my PhD. This Friday I had the deadline to send my first writings to my supervisors, so I spent all of this week writing and editing and formatting, at least 6 hours a day. My brain felt literally dry at the end of each day, as if I had wrung everything it could possibly contain out of it. But the result is that on Friday I could send my supervisors almost 30,000 words of material, which I was quite impressed with. In this first year of being a PhD there was so much I needed to adjust to, from living in a new place and working at a new university to developing and teaching my own modules and working myself into my subject matter. So the fact that I've already got this much written feels very good. And now the semester is about to start, so I get to say goodbye to my writing for a little bit as I get started on teaching a new module. The one I'm currently developing is about monstrosity and the Other in Old English and Old Norse literature and I'm very much looking forward to talking to my students about it!

Because I did so much writing this week I didn't get around to a lot of reading and also had to delay a podcast episode. I was simply too tired by the end of the day to really focus on another page of something. I did listen to audiobooks though and finished Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean, which I had really enjoyed reading as an E-book as well. I'm not finally getting back into Harrow the Ninth as well on Audible. I'd tried starting it a few times the past couple of months, but the beginning is quite confusing (on purpose, I think) and I'd never fully had the patience to pay enough attention. This weekend, I'm listening to it while knitting and that seems to be the perfect combination, as I'm really enjoying it! My sister and I also got tickets to see Taylor Swift's Eras Tour concert film in Oslo on the 13th of October. We both really enjoy her music and we'd already planned our little Norwegian getaway, so when I saw the film would be out, we of course had to get tickets to see it together!

Posted this week:

• Review: The Undying Tower by Melissa Welliver

Recommendation

Have been listening to this nonstop while I was writing, so here ya go again!

Mailbox Monday

Only one book this week, but one I am very excited about!

The Impudent Edda by Rowdy Geirsson (Puffin Carcass; 11/22/23)

After 800 years, the final installment of The Edda Trilogy has at long last arrived! Picking up where its medieval forebears, The Poetic Edda and The Prose Edda, left off, The Impudent Edda not only introduces readers to a fresh, new perspective on both familiar and previously unknown narratives of Norse mythology, but also brings the world's foremost epic fantasy trilogy to its inevitable and fateful conclusion: in a dank alleyway behind a dive bar in Boston.

This special Puffin Carcass Deluxe Edition presents the complete text of The Impudent Edda in English for the first time ever. Masterfully translated from the original Bostonian by esteemed Impudent Eddic scholar, Rowdy Geirsson, this volume offers readers a deeply poetic yet highly accessible version of fun and classic tales ranging from Odin's unprovoked murder of an ancient witch to Freyja's voluntary experiment as a prostitute among lecherous dwarves to Thor's drunken and petty act of larceny on the eve of Ragnarok, the final world-shattering battle of the gods. 

The Poetic Edda is one of my favourite mythological/legendary medieval texts ever and I very much nejoy Snorri's Prose Edda as well, so I love how Rowdy Geirsson is positing his retelling as a kind of "third" in a trilogy. From what I've read so far it has a really fun tone and I love the framework of a lost manuscript being discovered!

That's it from me this week! What have you been up to?