Ilan Stavans

It's hard to read creation myths without understanding the cultural references, but you'd need so many footnotes it would probably look like pages of Talmud. There were a few references I caught that weren't fully explained in the text (e.g. the creation of humans from maize involves Paxil, brokenness, and Cayala, bitter water, to create human blood --- nixtamalization!), but that just proved to me how much was going over my head. Getting a sense of the shape of the mythology (descending and sometimes rising from the underworld, repeated apocalypses) and some common themes (twins) was still worthwhile and interesting.

Sadly not a comic (I would read the hell out of that) but nice, if intermittent, illustrations. But again, with so much visual symbolism that I know I must have been missing....!

Pronunciation guide thanks to my excellent linguistics nerd friend Cass: "x" = "sh", "j" = "h" (like in Spanish). I assume ' is for a glottal stop, but don't quote me on that. This seems like the kind of thing that should have been in the book....… (más)