Maureen’s Comments (group member since Mar 02, 2009)

Maureen’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

good god. spirit house is beautiful. with a labyrinth, yet!

i haven't been part of the discussion because i usually can't afford to go two years in a row (appreciate lara's attempt to make it possible for it to be cheaper for me and others on the east coast, i do. :)

if i were able to attend, july is better for me over august.

as for drives, i think no more than two hours drive from the airport -- i've never been to northern california and would appreciate looking at it. i mean, i've flown in to seattle three times now, and never seen the city. :)

rod!!!!!

that is gorgeous. is that cover a nice texture? i would like to touch it!

the art reminds me of my friend andy's comic book art. :)

covet covet

does the edition have that cursed poem in?

(sorry, i still have to come back and blab some more. i've been in tooth pain hell since christmas day, and i just had a pulpotomy at the dentist today. the pain is killer. i hope you had a happy christmas, and oh look, it's 9:30! happy new year's eve and year, rod! :)

somehow a previous comment from rod about whether i thought this was a guy's book disappeared. i didn't see any of that pete postlethwaite business so i have to comment on that still! :)

rod!

i saw that david had made a comment along these lines in his review that the long ships was a guy's book, and will admit that rankled. if some men or women don't like funny adventure stories with dry-witted vikings voyaging the high seas then i don't suppose we're going to have all that much to talk about anyway. i can only talk shoes for so long. :) so no, i don't think of it as a guy's book. i think of it as an adventure novel and thus accessible to anybody of any sex who likes books in that vein. :) i can't speak for other women but i kind of hate being measured by girly standards anyway. i suspect that if you compared my interests to a typical man's they'd probably be more traditionally masculine. :P

why it isn't a five star book for me? well, i'd suggest it's because i'm pretty familiar with and love the original texts that this novel just doesn't make five star in my head. i think if you're going to do a new viking saga with poetry than it should be kick ass. and the poetry in the long ships doesn't compare for example -- egil's saga is rife with wonderful little poems about beetled brows and beer, war and justice and the choices of men.

here's one i like for example:

The King in his coat
Of steel sets this gold coil,
This ring, on my right arm
Where falcons have rested:
The gift hangs glowing,
My arm its gallows:
Honour was earned
By the feaster of eagles.

or this one:

I'm drunk, and Olvir
Is ashen-faced with ale,
This brew from the beast's horn
Bubbled through my lips;
Your feet won't follow
Instructions, old fellow,
Though my poetry patters
And pours like rain on you.

i mean, egil is the mack daddy of icelandic dis rapping, right? and orm and toke think they are poets but nothing they come up with matches up to the poetry in the old stuff for me. and as toke or orm point outs at one point, i thought there was going to be a lot more fighting. :P so i came in with a bias, and an expectation, and that's why the long ships gets only four stars from me. it's still a great book -- i love a lot of my four-star books but there's just some aspect in them that doesn't quite do it for me. but hell, it's a hilarious book -- i laughed constantly when i was reading it. those deadpan observations are precisely what tickle my funny bone (i loved the sea-sickness episodes so much!) and it certainly gets five stars for that.

i found the ending a little too abrupt but it was interesting to come back to the beginning of orm's story in order to get to the end. i find circular compositions very satisfying. (man, i'm going to steal so much from this comment for my review. :)

RODERITY!

and man, i have never had pink eye but it sounds awful. anything that makes it painful to read should not exist. i'm sorry, rod! but i'm grateful that posterity knows about this. forewarned is forearmed. does one have to go to the doctor to get pink eye medicine? somebody was telling me the other day that they were using breast milk to soothe an eye injury (not that i'm suggesting you accost any lactating ladies.) and to get away from the ever-deepening hole i am digging myself i will now suggest that it is a shame father willibald is not around to tend to your wound. :)

welcome jim, dave, and alice! so nice to hear new voices in the fiction files. i hope you stick around after the infinite jest discussion! :)

p.s. nice to see new profile pics and hear new voices in the fiction files -- i'll go welcome jim and dave on that thread. :)

this is almost a heartwarming remark from our dear e-monk. and it actually eases my mind that he's less worried that he was before about the indies. :)

i am less offended by the ebook than other people (probably because i work on them and like them for educational tools) but i've actually come around to wanting to have my cake and eat it too. in my ideal world, as when i buy vinyl, i get a link to download mp3s, (going back to emonk's comment about the book industry in the 70s -- sounds a lot like vinyl houses today). comparable to that, i would like a print book to come packaged with a download so i could use it to search for quick references (i can't CTRL F in my novels and i keep running out of book darts) and ideally, though TPTB tend to make this difficult, i'd like to save the time of transcribing short sections of text when i quote it for reviews by cutting and pasting.

what i care most about is the text, the words. the mode of delivery i am most comfortable with, and prefer is printed text. books are portable and easy to read in a variety of light and weather scenarios (no glare at the beach on a screen! no terror that my gadget will break down or get wet in the rain). my books will last a long time. i'm not convinced any modern gadget or web storage has a long shelf life (pun oh so intended). but i also don't really make the distinction between buying a book as a thing that patty made earlier -- my main concern is that if i buy words in an electronic format, will they still be there for tomorrow? not as convinced about that...

hey jacob! thank you so much for posting your thoughts and our exchange. it's not so much for as it is for POSTERITY. posterity must know what we thought about the long ships! and lord knows if it's just on my pokey profile page nobody is ever going to see your thoughts! and look, now rod has seen them and commented on them so it's POSTERITY and ROD!! :)

i've been working like a slave for the man, so i'm too pooped to write any actual responses to either of your comments but i've just met magister rainald and expect i should be done the novel tomorrow. so i'll be back! :)

well, i wanted to do some more research first, and i briefly considered holding onto this for my review because i haven't seen anybody else mention it but i got a new cell phone this week. because i am a nerd, i was reading through the user manual and started when i read the name bluetooth. then i thought about the symbol and realized those were purposeful runes. then i looked up bluetooth on wikipedia, and sure enough! invented by ericsson and named after harald bluetooth unifier of ancient norsemen, was now unifying various modern technologies. :P

so there's that.

and then there's the idea of the hero. our modern and relatively late model of the hero is the superman. he is stoic and strong and stalwart. the heroes i love best are the ancient ones -- to a man, my favourites are chronic whiners and complainers. they do all the heroic stuff, yeah, but they're bitching about it the whole time. look at jason in the argonautica, one of the worst culprits -- he outsources everything to heracles and the other heroes as much as he can, and cries salty tears over his tribulations. and odysseus, what a moaner! i am stuck on this island with this hot babe and why do i have to wait so interminably long for everything? egil, my favourite from the viking sagas is a brazen poet, smacking people down and sulking when things don't go his way (oh hello, achilles). and then of course, the dane, hamlet himself. these heroes are crying all the time. which all leads up to orm. good old orm. he's a delicate constitution, and he doesn't like fighting out in the cold and would risk humiliation over his frail lungs. the guy's a northman for pete's sake! and his depressions, his sulks about how he's always getting screwed. it's the best. :)

so that's all i've got for today. any thoughts?

thanks for letting us know, patty! i left off reading since i was so much more ahead of the other kids but now will start again.

and (perhaps not surprisingly) i do have some stuff i've held in reserve that i want to say -- specifically about our friend king harald blue tooth. :)

oh, you don't have to rush -- i was really just asking -- i read quickly, and wanted to make sure i didn't rush on ahead of you guys too much. :)

i can put it down for a while!

when am i supposed to stop reading this?

orm just proposed marriage and was about to sail off when toke stole the muslim girl. that means i'm almost at the end of part one. where are you guys at? i think i'm going to be all comparative again. :P

oh, it is making me smirk that toke's new chattel is a girl from northern portugal. :)

i have never seen this, no. but now i really want to -- i watched a few other clips at that same source. i love ernest borgnine! and i think it's hilarious that there's another historical drama with tony curtis and kirk douglas before spartacus! they are almost completely anachronistic despite their best thespian efforts and they always have skimpy outfits on. :)

i did a little reading and i see the axe ladder is used there while we have the spear ladder in the long ships. that toke is rather effervescent, isn't he?

Rod wrote: "I like how Orm befriends the people who essentially kidnapped him. I think it's just the culture, because Orm's people essentially do the same thing, so it's not like they have moral high ground or anything..."

the bronze doesn't seem to be official: this guy claims your bronze rule as an iron rule: http://theunmaskedavenger.xanga.com/7...

but absolutely, i agree. ransoming was rampant -- not just with the north men but throughout europe if not the world. (julius caesar and the pirates, anyone?) and it was wild enough that as you point out, you banded together with whomever you could.

and they did their best to legislate so they'd didn't have to kill every single person they came up against in the interest of survival. it's fascinating to see how it all evolved. in fact, when i contrast it with my own modern outrage at the idea that somebody would intrude into my home my reaction is almost comical. these people lived most of their days guarding against the inevitable invasion or doing the invading themselves. :P

did you guys see the refn movie, valhalla rising? it was referenced earlier in the thread i think. it was very intense: closest to what i'd imagined viking survival would be like when your boat went astray. not nearly enough poetry and law court stuff though. :P

rod! i love electra!!!! that might be my favourite typeface (i used to have a poster of popular ones from my book production class posted in my office and i used to look lovingly at it all the time.)

so COVETING YOUR KNOPF. :)

jacob! i am reading the sexy lady version of course! it's the best! :)

now back to that poem. i kind of wish i knew if the original book had it, because i don't really like the skew of it, and i'm not even a feminist. you'll know of course, if all the women are harridans like Asa, the mother of Odd and Orm in this book (but i'm assuming not because of the sexy lady cover -- i'm sure we can talk about that when we get there) but i never read viking sagas for the women. the women are incidental. it's about the raiding, and the sea, and the ship yes, but also their whole complicated system of justice -- they don't have to kill orm because none of them are related to the guy he killed. they go to court a lot -- i don't know if that happens here. they kill a lot of people, and have sex and drink and spout poetry. it's all pretty awesome. :) so that contrast about leaving your women behind for the ship kipling romanticizes more than i would, you know? it's not about the women -- it's about the men.

i'm only at the part where solomon has proposed his plan to exact revenge on those who sold him into slavery. it's a lot of fun so far. :)

my copy has a rudyard kipling poem at the beginning. is this true for all editions?

heh. probably just as well because i wouldn't want people getting too cozy and calling me the old battleaxe. or blodaxe. i have to say i like that mine sounded the scariest. :P

hi patty! thanks for the perspective... i guess we'll see how it goes for us. i'm guessing whatever comments i have will be in reflecting on the book relative to my deep and abiding love for the viking sagas...

jacob! thanks for finding that -- mine is Arnora Blodaxe. now should we call ourselves by our viking names as we discuss the book is my next question? what do you say, jarlebanke? :P