Part the First
I've seen a few discussions online recently about "books that changed my life" and I thought I'd like to include my two cents. I'll limit my responses to "books that changed my life in terms of the theme of this blog." I don't know that "changed my life" is the best phrase, but we'll leave it at that.The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis from "The Chronicles of Narnia."
This is one of the first books I remember my mom reading to us before bed. Three children go from England to Narnia, where they join young King Caspian X on the Dawn Treader. He is traveling the seas of his realm and searching for a group of nobles who disappeared during his predecessor's reign. There are dragons and sea-serpents and mysterious islands and the Dufflepuds, who are people with only one leg and a huge foot, and when he naps, a Dufflepud lies on his back and uses his foot as a shade.* Furthermore, Reepicheep is in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and he has one of my favorite lines in the whole series: "If you are a foe we do not fear you, and if you are a friend your enemies shall be taught the fear of us."
They Went Whistling: Women Wayfarers, Warriors, Runaways, and Renegades by Barbara Holland.
Holland gives short biographies of women who did what they wanted to in times when women were supposed to do what society wanted them to. My favorite woman in the book is Grace O'Malley, the Irish pirate queen; other women Holland describes include Joan of Arc, Belle Starr, Mother Jones, and Daisy Bates, a Victorian Irishwoman who moved to Australia and studied and lived with Aborigines for much of her life, all the while wearing proper Victorian dress, down to the petticoats. After reading They Went Whistling I am always filled with a desire to do something strange and important. It's not long, and it's a very engaging read that I recommend to everyone.
The Travels of Marco Polo and The Travels of John Mandeville.
Since I cannot properly explain my awe at imagining what Polo and Mandeville experienced on their journeys, I won't even try. Leaving aside academic discussions of whether or not they actually went, I am amazed at their courage.†
Part the Second
Yesterday I bought the National Geographic Atlas of the World, Seventh Edition, because it is wonderful and it was on sale for $9.99. Now I have more maps than I really have use for. Now I can take pictures of the maps of the places I'm describing in my posts! I realize that my excitement is pretty dorky, and I am unashamed. But it's ironic, because I'm not especially good at reading maps. And I'm still not convinced that my compass actually works.
I hope National Geographic doesn't sue me.Part the Third
This week's place I must now visit: York, England. I have rather a long list of places that I want to visit and things that I want to see, which I will try to find and post at a later date; York is now on that list. Before yesterday I knew that York has a very famous cathedral, York Minster, and that it's in northern England, specifically Yorkshire, where people have charming accents, according to movies such as "The Full Monty" and "The History Boys." I also vaguely knew that the Roman name for York was Eboracum. (I think we should start calling New York Nova Eboracum. Take that, New Amsterdam!) That was all I knew, though. Yesterday I found myself on the York Tourism board website, where I found out about all the historic sites in York. I learned that York is a walled city--walled cities are automatically cool. Clifford's Tower was built by William the Conqueror. There is a late-medieval building called the Merchant Adventurers' Hall. York is the site of the Viking Age city Jorvik; there's now a museum/visitors' center about Norse life. If I go, I promise not to annoy anyone about the word "Viking." All of the pictures of York make it look like my kind of place. I'll let you know when I get there.Footnotes
*If you don't want to have any childhood illusions smashed, do not read the following.The Dufflepuds were taken directly from ancient and medieval literature. There they are called "sciopods." They're in Polo and Mandeville and possibly Pliny's Natural History and lots of other sources. Lewis was a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge. While the modern reader might view this use as something akin to plagiarism, in the Middle Ages writers frequently borrowed from other sources without giving credit (see Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron).†
†Want to know more? Ask me about my thesis!
