Woodrot Padcost 47: books read aloud in 2013 [MP3, 25 MB]
Duration: 27:50

‘Tis the season for literary bloggers to write about the best things they read this year. But in my case, much of my most interesting reading is out loud, in nightly Skype calls with Rachel Rawlins. Usually I’m the reader, but sometimes she is able to get an electronic version of whatever it is we’re reading and we take turns. I thought it might be fun to record us talking about what we liked and didn’t like this year (though Rachel had her doubts that anyone else would care). Here are the main books we talked about:

• Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish [Buile Suibhne] by Seamus Heaney (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983)
• Ten Poems About Sheep selected and introduced by Neil Astley (Candlestick Press, 2012)
• Bee Journal by Sean Borodale (Jonathon Cape/Random House, 2012)
• The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy (Pan Macmillan, 2012)
• Seven Viking Romances translated by Herman Pálsson and Paul Edwards (Penguin, 1985)
• Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney translated by Herman Pálsson and Paul Edwards (Penguin, 1978)
• The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki translated by Jesse L. Byock (Penguin, 1998)

Other books mentioned in passing:

• Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths by Nancy Marie Brown (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
• The Saga of the Jomsvikings translated by Lee M. Hollander (University of Texas Press, 2011 [1955])
• Sagas of Warrior-Poets (various translators), edited by Diana Whaley (Penguin, 2002)
• Comic Sagas and Tales from Iceland (various translators), edited by Vidar Hreinsson (Penguin, 2013)
• The Saga of the Volsungs translated by Jesse L. Byock (Penguin, 1999)
• Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway by Snorri Sturluson, translated by Lee M. Hollander (University of Texas Press, 1964)
• Grettir’s Saga translated by Denton Fox and Herman Pálsson (University of Toronto Press, 1974)
• Grettir’s Saga translated by Jesse Byock with skaldic verses translated by Russell Poole (Oxford University Press, 2009)

From palace to cave: one wound closes & another gapes. It turns out the king’s cattle are horned marauders, a scourge on the land. I cut them open & find shredded leaves, aborted destinies. But when the sun goes down the trees stretch, reclaiming the crofts, & I return to my mountain & to you.

When you saw me bloody in the pens, your fear was only that I would leave you among those bewitched creatures shaped through the ages by human hungers. Here, our desire is like water from a glacier, white with the milk of stones. We remember who we were before furs & fabrics, even before they gave us names & trajectories.

I can get more naked than any other beast. Tomorrow I will lie down in a circle of hunters & let them try to find me in that mountain of flesh. Only your hand slipping under my shoulder will recover the gold ring that, in another story, might’ve pierced my septum. From our union will come wild hunters of men.