What I’m Reading: My Nonfiction Odyssey
I’m currently reading The Norns in Old Norse Mythology (2011) by Karen Bek-Pederson.
While I’m also a fan of comics, sci-fi, and fantasy, I’m currently on a nonfiction streak. My favorites are books about religion and mythology, history, folklore, and anything a bit strange, but you’ll often find me prowling the stacks, searching for something new.
After noticing that a lot of the more obscure nonfiction books don’t have any good reviews on sites like Goodreads, I’ve started writing my own. Here on my blog, each book review is accompanied with a public domain or Creative Commons image that I felt complemented the book.
The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition, and the Post-Glacial World
In The Edge of Memory (2018), Patrick Nunn argues that humans have preserved within their oral traditions memories of past events that occurred more than 7,000 years ago. Despite the seeming outlandishness of the claim—how could humans pass down specific information accurately for hundreds of generations when most of us barely know who are great-grandparents even are?—there is a narrow area of his evidence that seems convincing…