Good warriors, great sailors, explorers, berserker, Odin, Thor, Loki, a magic hammer, Norway, ship burial rites. This was basically the extent of my knowledge regarding Vikings, without any particular interest to find out more about them. Also, I knew the Normans were somehow connected with the Vikings but had no clear idea of why and how, that is until I binge watched the TV Show.… Read more
One of the most prominent aspects of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s language is how vibrating his poems are when recited. And this comes from using repetition, alliteration and assonance, a feature already touched upon here. (full overview and general thoughts about the book here)
Another linguistic element that frequently appears in his sonnets is represented by coined words, such as: “leafmeal”, “quickgold”, the verbs “justices”, “twindles”, and many more.… Read more
As I’ve mentioned here, Gerard Manley Hopkins was completely unknown to me, and reading his work was a challenge, but a very satisfying one. Here I talk about the poems that stuck with me the most. They might not be the happiest ones, but they were the most striking ones to me. “Spring and Fall” captured a moment in childhood that brought back memories, “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” is exploring desolation in an astonishing beautiful manner, while “I wake and feel” and “No worst” are the quintessence of how it feels to despair.
I have no clear idea how to start talking about this book, other than it was a peculiar journey reading it. “As kingfishers catch fire” is a poetry collection by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Victorian English poet and a Jesuit priest. Given this unusual combination, I first proceeded to find out more about the author.
The first book from the Penguin’s Little Black Classics collection of 80 works includes four short stories by Giovanni Boccaccio placed in the fourteenth-century Florence. They are but a sample from “The Decameron”, where we can find 100 stories in total told by a group of people trying to kill time while they spend two weeks in isolation in a villa to avoid the Black Death.
I wanted to participate in a seasonal book club and this was one of the selected reads for autumn. It’s not particularly autumnish, I would place it more as a winter reading. I did not know anything about Jennifer McMahon before picking this book, and I am not exactly inclined to find out anything about her or her other books after reading The Winter People.