Reading Still Matters

I was recently in the United States and dropped into Barnes & Noble to pick up a book (I am Canadian). Turns out that I grabbed The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire by Tore Skeie. I am not going to lie, I mean I think Vikings are pretty cool, but really I was attracted to the book by the cover and the crazy good title.  A thoughtful package to a book can open covers so to speak, even if a book can't be judged by its cover. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/3RNMXpb When I started reading it, I was surprised to learn that Tore Skeie is a Norwegian historian and that the book was translated from the Norwegian language. The Wolf Age (originally published in Norway as Hvitekrist ) is his first major work to be translated into English and it really does have a Scandinavian centered perspective, so it was very cool.  For the most part, books on Norse history I have read have been from the English perspective. The Wolf Ag...

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom by Tom Holland is very interesting take on Western Europe during the two centuries surrounding the apocalyptic year 1000.  Basically, Holland takes us through a 200-year period across the various regions of Europe in order to demonstrate that the events of this time period created the society that would ultimately become modern Europe.  For Holland, this was the period when the area that is now Europe became something other than just the shattered remains of the Western Roman Empire.   Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4oinnEB The historical narrative pivots around the year 1000 and the pervasive fear of the Antichrist and the Second Coming, and digs in on how these apocalyptic anxieties influenced the actions of rulers, clergy, and peasants alike. Generally, Holland works the history region by region. Treating as separate but connected narratives, the happenings in what would become Italy, Spain, Fran...