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 Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth
Neal H. Walls’s The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth (1992) provides a thorough and thoughtful, if not easy to read, analysis of the mythological character of the Ugaritic goddess Anat. Anat was a goddess in the pantheon of Ugarit, a Bronze Age city in what is now northern Syria, from which a corpus of cuneiform texts was discovered in 1928. Anat is an independent and headstrong young warrior woman who hacks men to pieces and wears their hands and heads…