highlyeccentric: Sheer Geekiness, unfortunately - I just think this stuff is really cool (phd comics) (Sheer Geekiness)
highlyeccentric ([personal profile] highlyeccentric) wrote2009-02-11 11:28 pm

OHGOD

Nearly done. Books all on shelves. And they fit in more-or-less reasonable order. My personal categorisation techniques leave much to be desired, but oh well... There's one half-shelf which is more or less 'Women, 1880-present'. Thus we have Letters from Louisa next to Marie Stopes, next to a couple of random biographies and a book on women and religion in the eighties, and a bit further along we have Drusilla Modjeska next to an autobiography about life after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and next to THAT the Generic Puberty Guide I had when was pre-pubescent, followed by Baghdad Burning. The other half of that shelf is ostensibly Modern Literature from Jane Austen to Alex Jones, via Edgar Allen Poe and Brokeback Mountain...

On the up-side, the self above that is a lovely sweep of the English Language from Beowulf to Shakespeare, excluding Arthuriana and including (for lack of anywhere better to put them) a couple of non-Arthurian Old French texts. Followed, appropriately, by literary and historcical commentary from 'The Celts in Europe' to 'Feminism and Renaissance Studies'.

Also, I found a small heap of books I haven't had out for... six? ten? years. Including, much to my dreadful delight, Ann M. Marston's The Western King, responsible for my first encounter with Magic Psychic Fantasy Sex. I started re-reading it, naturally, and, with the added insight of four years' medieval studies, am intriuged. What I'd taken for straight down the line Celto-fantasy is in fact Celto-Saxon Fantasy, with a full complement of Vikings, Scots and inexplicable Romans, all under thinly veiled pseudonyms. Given that it's about a Magic Prophesied King Uniting The Land Against Either The Not-Vikings or the Not-Romans or both, I would put it on the Arthurian shelf, except that there's no space since I put Narnia in Tolkien and the Mabinogion.

[identity profile] highlyeccentric.livejournal.com 2009-02-12 07:23 am (UTC)(link)
MAGIC FANTASY PSYCHIC SEX. (Far better than Telepathic Sci-Fi Sex or Telepathic Dragon orgies, thank YOU Anne McCaffrey...) Oh, definitely, Magic Warrior Soul Bonding had a huge formative influence upon me and my terrible youthful compositions. An overdose of Magic Warrior Soul Bonding (Marston, Douglass, who else was there?) is responsible for my love-hate relationship with the Amazing True Destiny Bonding Slash sort of genre...

I missed the Saxon part. I think I thought the Saeseni were Saxons, as opposed to Not!Vikings. Anyway, now that I know about Anglo-Saxons, and more about Celts, and many other exciting things besides, I'm stumbling across all kinds of hilarious things. I think Marston must've studied early medieval history or lit at SOME point.

On the other hand, thanks to fandom and just plain being more awesome than I was, I keep wanting to go through the book with a red pen - tighten this sentence up here, cut that one there, dear GOD improve your sex scenes...