Bookish Thoughts

The Witch's Heart was an absolutely delightful retelling of Norse mythology. It centers on Angroda, a witch with the gift of prophecy. After fleeing Odin, who will do anything to learn what she can see, she falls in love with Loki and builds a family with him in the woods. But she can't hide forever. As the book marches relentlessly on towards Ragnarok, she does her best to try and save her children from their fate. I loved this re-imagining of the classic myths, and it re-awoke my interest in Norse Mythology in general. I'd never heard of Angroboda before, but I recognized some of the stories about Loki and Thor and Freya. Those stories are usually the main attraction, but here they're side stories - Loki's excuses for not being around more. It also built on Skadi, who I recognized immediate because one of my best friends named her car Skadi in high school. It was so much fun to get caught up in this world. And the best trick that Gornichec pulled was the passage ...

I've definitely read The Odyssey before. It was an assignment in the Classical Mythology class I took in college. But I think I fought my way through it in high school, too. I think it might have been half the reason I signed up for that course. But even in taking that course I had a hard time keeping all the different gods and heroes and stories straight, and over the years it's all become a muddled mess in my brain. I knew the key points: Calypso, Cyclops, the shroud Penelope was pretending to weave. Most of it had fallen out of my memory, though. And then Emily Wilson released a new translation last year that everyone got really excited about. The first translation to English by a woman! A newly readable version! I had to give this epic poem another try. I'm glad I read it. Particularly because I had forgotten over half of what happened. All the exciting bits of Odysseus' journey are confined to about 4 chapters. The remaining 21 chapters are taken up by lots of ...

The Penelopiad  is Margaret Atwood's exploration of Penelope, wife of Odysseus in The Odyssey . What was she up to while he was gone for twenty years? How did she raise her son and manage her household and fend off all those suitors? And what of the twelve maids who seemed to alternate between loyalty and betrayal and were ultimately hanged? Atwood alternates between prose sections from Penelope's point of view and a Greek Chorus of the hanged maids told in a variety of styles, most of them verse. They offer a counterpoint, sometimes directly contradicting what Penelope claims and allowing Atwood to maintain ambiguity about a story that cannot, ultimately, be known. This book was fine. Or at least it was short. I've been hankering to re-read The Odyssey , particularly the new translation by Emily Wilson, and I thought this might help get me in the mood. But perhaps I should have waited to read it afterwards, with the original material fresher in my mind. Ultimately I di...

Kevin got me this book for Christmas, and I really tried to read it. It's a collection of Hawaiin myths, most of them about five pages long. It seemed like perfect bedtime reading. But it was awful. Disorganized and poorly translated to the point of being almost unreadable. As short as these stories were, I often got bored and lost the thread halfway through, which left me wondering what had just happened and what the point was more often than not. About three-quarters of the way through, I finally gave up. I wanted to like this. I wanted to learn more about Hawaiin myth, because they have a huge pantheon of gods that I know very little about. I at least have some of the basics now: Maui to trickster, Pele the quick-tempered and jealous god of lava, and so on. But any entertainment was drowned out by confusion. Information is never introduced in a natural way to build tension, instead slipped in right before it's needed. It didn't help that I picked up on one or two mis...

Christopher Moore is an author that people (men) always seem to think I'll love. They tell me he's hillarious, that he has an incredible grasp of the human condition which leads to reaistic and sympathetic characters you can't help but identify with. These people are wrong, and Christopher Moore remains an author that I just don't understand. Years ago I read his book, Blooduscking Fiends , which may be the worst vampire story I've ever read. And I've read then entire Twilight series. Despite this, I always felt like I ought to give Lamb  a chance. It's often held up as his best work, the book that serves as the best introduction to his work. So when I saw it at a used book sale, I picked it up. And when I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar  this past Easter, I got the itch to read another take on the man behind the myth. The good news is that this book wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. There are some genuinely insteresting ideas in here, particu...

I tend to be a year or more behind the literature world. This is mostly because I prefer paperbacks to hardbacks, and you usually have to wait a year for those. I also get most of my books used (I go through so many that this is more economical), and that usually adds another year or two to the delay. This helps me avoid some of the hype and weed out the mediocre books with good marketing teams. If people are still talking about a book two or three years after its release, odds are good that it's worth reading. I'm generally pretty good at not getting my hopes up right when a book comes out, even if it sounds like something I'd enjoy. Then again, sometimes I hear about a book and it sounds so perfect for me that I either rush out and buy it immediately or I spend an entire year itching to get my hands on it. And when a book is compared to American Gods  (one of my favorites) as often as The Library at Mount Char  was, I'm bound to obsess over it until I get my hands o...

I picked up The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul expecting something light and silly that I wouldn't have to pay too much attention to. And while this book was light and pretty easy to read, it had far more of a plot that I was expecting. There was a mystery to be solved and connections to be made and everything. Apart from the surprise of the plot, I was most struck by how familiar this book felt. Which is to say that I could clearly see the influence Adams has had on some of my favorite authors. Gently reminded me more than a little of Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell from Good Omens . And I have to wonder if the dying Norse Gods in this book had any influence on Gaiman's American Gods . It took me a little while to get into this book, mostly because I hadn't expected to pay as much attention to it as I ended up needing to. But by the time Kate was investigating the nursing home, I was on board. Things came together a little abruptly at the end, but it was sti...

The eighth volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Worlds' End , is easily my favorite. It's another collection of short stories, but these are connected with a Chaucer-like framework. Several beings, finding themselves caught in various storms, make their way to the Worlds' End Inn. While the storm rages outside, the pass the time telling stories to each other. The stories are a lot of fun. One concerns the dreams of a city. Another is a fairly standard tale of a girl dressing as a boy so she can live as a sailor. My favorite takes place in an idealized America where a young president is able to unlock the potential of what our country can be. Between stories we return to the Inn, to see the conversations the characters are having there. And to finally discover the reason for the storm that has driven all of them there. In some ways, this volume represents the end of the series, with the next two volumes delving in to what happened and why and what w...

The sixth volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is another collection of short stories. This volume actually collects the issues slightly out of order, as some of them were originally released before the Game of You arc began. But the ordering in this volume works quite well. Actually, since this is the order I was introduced to the comics in, I can hardly imagine a different order. I'm just going to go through this story by story. Fear of Falling: The first issue is incredibly short. It functions as a prologue to the volume, appearing even before the table of contents. But it remains one of the more powerful messages in the whole series. This is one of the stories that sticks with me. Three Septembers and a January : This issue tells the story of the first and only emperor of the United States of America: Emperor Norton I. Remarkably, this is a mostly true story. There was a man living in San Francisco in the late 1800s who styled himself Emperor. The st...

A Game of You is the fifth volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. It's unique in that it doesn't really showcase Dream at all. Although half the story takes place in dreams, Morpheus himself only appears in the first and last issue. Instead, the story follows several women who live in the same apartment building and are all struggling with identity in their own way. Identity is the main them of this book. The identities we choose for ourselves and the ones society forces on us. It looks at how our perception of ourselves can change depending on where or when we are. This story explores how fragile identity can be and how important it is to have your own identity acknowledged by the people around you. Barbie is the main character in this story. She appeared briefly in the second volume, A Doll's House . When last we saw her, Barbie was married to a man named Ken and living the perfect suburban fantasy with him. But now she's divorced, broke and wi...

For a long time Season of Mists was my favorite volume in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. It's the volume that really made me fall in love with this series, and it stayed my favorite for a few years until I got around to reading the eighth volume, Worlds' End . (It took me a long time to collect the entire series). The premise of Season of Mists is pretty straight forward. Fed up with his duties and just plain bored, Lucifer quits. He kicks everyone out of hell, locks the door, and gives the key to Dream. This concept completely hooked me. I loved the way this played with Christian mythology. Maybe the Devil is sick and tired of the endless war with heaven. Maybe he'd rather just chill on a beach somewhere. For his part, Dream has to deal with a host of mythological being who all want Hell for their own. Odin, Thor, and Loki want to move in so they can avoid Ragnarok and the end of their world. Egyptian and Japanese gods want to expand their current la...

The third installment in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is a collection of short stories, rather than a cohesive arc. However, a line from Death in the final issue helps tie all of the stories together thematically [M]ythologies take longer to die than people believe. They linger on in a kind of dream country that affects all of you. Each of the stories concerns an old mythology. Beliefs and figures that have passed into the realm of stories. Calliope : In the first tale, an author kidnaps the youngest muse and holds her hostage. He rapes her in an effort to get ideas and grows prosperous on his projects. She appeals to Morpheus to free her. He does this by flooding the author's mind with ideas, so many that he can't sort through them in any meaningful way. After Calliope is released, she elects to retire to the dream realm, to continue only in the minds of men. This may be my favorite story of the four collected in this volume. It's certainly the most ...