There is something immediately nauseating – hear me out- about this book. You can be nauseous when you feel ill, when you ride a roller coaster, when you are nervous, or when you eat too many sweets. There is a feeling of hopeful dread that climbs over you (and all of the characters within) before you have finished reading the first page. There is a feeling that you have been here – in a cafe in Prague, under an overpass in Manila, in a field […]
Imagine a Studio Ghibli film as an 80s novel
The Nargun and the Stars won a Hans Christian Andersen medal, I’m assuming sometime in the seventies when it first came out. My copy is the 1988 reprint and you can really tell based on the cover. I can’t remember at all why and where I picked this up, but I’d bet it was because of the title, not the cover art. Post-reading, I am, as usual, mostly bugged by the inaccuracies. Oh well. So, based on the title, I’d have guessed this book would […]
So good I ignored everyone and everything until I’d finished
Unlike the rest of the world (or so it occasionally seems), I haven’t read The Song of Achilles, mostly due to my being possession of a fiery hatred of Achilles that tends to ruin anything he happens to be mentioned in. However, I did note all of the squealing going on around it and so, when people started talking about Circe, promptly splurged on it. I was not disappointed. Taking another figure from the myths – one mostly known for turning Odysseus’ men into pigs […]
New translation of a 2,000 plus year old classic. #CBRBingo
I first read The Odyssey when I was a freshman in high school. I think it might actually have been the very first assigned reading that year, and I remember being excited for it, and liking the story, but having suuuuuch a hard time getting through it, because the translation I was reading was so dense. Looking back (and now having read this translation) I don’t actually think I liked it as much as I thought I did, and I have some definite opinions about […]