You guys, I finished the best book today. SO SO good. Jennifer Fulwiler recommended The Long Ships in a blog post ages ago, and the sample sat on my e-reader for ages. I started reading it as part of my "clean off the Kindle" summer project, but pretty quickly I was reading it for its own sake.
There's a scene near the end where a character is in peril, and I had to stop reading, set the book down, and take a couple of deep breaths. The rational part of me was saying, "This is a fictional character, and even if he were a real person he would have been dead for 900 years anyway." But he was a fictional character of whom I had grown very fond, and I wanted him to die a contented death in his old age -- not under the blade of an outlaw's axe.
It's describing such a different world, one in which a wounded man gets worried when there are no lice in his hair. Is his blood too thin to support a louse? It's a sign of his improvement when a further hunt finds a louse. For me it would be a sign of the apocalypse to find a louse in my hair. I'm not sure I would have cut it in 10th-century Denmark.
If you have read the Aubrey-Maturin series, you probably got to a point where a brief exchange between Jack and Stephen could make you laugh in a way impossible to explain to someone who hadn't read the books. I felt the same way about Orm and his friend. Who knew that a 500-page Viking novel would make me laugh out loud?
This is not a book for someone who gets indignant about improbable plot machinations (like my 15yo). You already know I'm not that reader, though. I loved this book. I will read it again. I'd love to chat about it in the comments if you've read it too!
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