What Mythology are your reading..... April 2010

I'm currently reading Japanese Tales

I recently finished reading a translation of The Kojiki and a book of Japanese Fairy Tales (don't have the book close to hand at the moment). Fascinating stuff.

I am reading (on and off) a book on Norse mythology titled The Children of Odin by Padraic Colum.

Mmmm. A classic!

And quite easy to read. It's for young adults

I am reading the Daughters of the Moon series by Lynne Ewing.

My book club's choice for April is Briar Rose by Jane Yolen, a YA novel retelling the Sleeping Beauty tale in a holocaust World War II setting. In the book, a survivor of the holocaust uses the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty as a metaphor for her life - the mist is the poisonous gas, the briars that enclose the castle stand for the fences of the camps and the sleep becomes the sleep of death.

Quite an interesting read but for me the characters lacked depth but it was YA fiction and not adult fiction so maybe I'm being a little picky.

socialpages, I think that book sounds really interesting! I have never heard of something like that, and maybe I'll go check it out.

Oh, I loved Briar Rose, too!

Peace, the book is part of a series of novel-length retold fairy tales: The Fairy Tale Series. If you like Briar Rose, you may want to look into the others as well.

No mythology on the go at the moment, but I recently read Derrek Hines' poetry book Gilgamesh, which is a retelling of the Sumerian myth of the King of Uruk and "wild man" Enkidu. Very good. Thinking I should perhaps read the actual Gilgamesh...

>11 cocoafiend: Gilgamesh is an excellent story!

One of the classes in my school is reading Gilgamesh. Apparently they don't like it so much hahaha

I'm presently rereading Averno by Louise Glück. Not mythology per se, but this book single-handedly renewed my interest in mythology, which was pretty much dormant since high school.

I began re-reading Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, an Arthurian poem. I had to read it for a class, but I went through it with an academic eye and read every sentence hunting for phrases to attack with a Post-Itt, so I didn't feel that I had done it justice.

While I'm enjoying it more this time around, its still just as difficult a read as it had been the first time, lol.

Although I love just about anything mythological, I will read anything by or about Joseph Campbell. His best-known work is "The Hero with a Thousand Faces".

The Internet Sacred Text Archive (http://sacred-texts.com/index.htm) has a mind-boggling collection of material related to religion/mythology/philosophy/whatever . The site management uses a *very* loose interpretation of "sacred"!

ISTA also offers the entire archive (through about 2009, approximately 1700 works) on DVD-ROM for $99.95 (shipping included). But much has been added to the archive since the disk was produced.

Enjoy, but come up for air once in a while!

'Just finished Mythology. 'Rather strange how she brought in Norse mythology in the last couple chapters...

>17 Sandydog1: It makes sense if you know why she wrote it. It's supposed to give you just enough mythology to appreciate literary allusions.

I guess I just have some issue with my anterior singulate cortex. A minor issue nonetheless.

'Currently reading Sailing the Wine Dark Sea. I'm not a huge Cahill fan (love his subjects, not his style), but so far, so good.

'Just finished the bawdy, picaresque and very very old novel, The Golden Ass