Modus vivendi

It has been two weeks since the first episode of the third season of TV series Game of Thrones  was aired. I became interested in GoT  in 2011 during the first season. Since the time, I have seen the complete first season, some episodes from the second and the first two episodes of the third. Since I prefer reading to watching, I was dragged to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire  on which the ongoing series is based. As I am not a native speaker of English and I have other work to do, I have been able to read the first two volumes only - Game of Thrones  and A Clash of Kings . Many people who like fantasy say that they like the George R. R. Martin’s saga, because it is an unusual piece of fantasy. The book is rich of many different and interesting characters, and the narrative does not seem to fit the cut-and-dried struggle of the good against the evil, the cornerstone of any classic fantastic story which we know from the works of J. R. R. Tolki...

Couple of weeks ago I accidentally ran into one book in the Bill Bryson library. I was looking for some anthropological books about myth and religion when I spotted a spine with the title saying: Four Theories of Myth in the Twentieth-Century History . I do not usually borrow books at random from a library, but I made an exception for this one, because after I skimmed through it, I decided that it was worth reading. The book was written by an American scholar Ivan Strenski and published in 1987. I have never heard of Mr. Strenski before, however, his book turned out to be a really good one. The book is about four major thinkers on the field of myth in the twentieth century: Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, historian of religion Mircea Eliade, and two famous anthropologists - Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Ivan Strenski gives his readers some basic ideas about all four theories, and he also places them in their historical context. For example, Strenski t...