Whoa, I've got a backlog building up :-p not as much spare energy as usual. But if I wait too long, everything's going to start running together, so here's a quick one:
This first book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is a fun romp--modernized Greek mythology given the Harry Potter treatment. Twelve year old Percy Jackson is a lovable misfit, transferred from one school to another because he chronically gets into trouble, only to discover that he's actually the son of a Greek god. He's whisked away to a special school for Olympian half-bloods, where he makes new friends, goes on crazy adventures and kills plenty of monsters.
I'll probably go into more detail about the series in later reviews, 'cause it's good enough to keep reading, and the beefs I have against it are pretty much balanced by the fun stuff.
I've been trying to read up on Norse mythology without being quite sure where to start. My first two attempts from a university library yielded a kind of reference book, with gods and heroes listed in alphabetical order, and the first volume of Jacob Grimm's Teutonic Mythology. The former had plenty of good information, but I was looking for something to read straight through, not a reference book. The later is apparently a very important and influential work on Norse Mythology, but it's a scholarly work, very heavy reading, and not exactly a book for beginners.
I was looking for something lighter than Teutonic Mythology, but more in-depth than D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths, which I read back in the 3rd grade. Using a public library this time, I found Sagas of the Norsemen.
Overview
Sagas opens with a bit of archaeological background, pictures of relics, and an account of funeral customs. Then it delves into a description of the pantheon, with a few brief stories of the gods' various adventures and hijinks. The next section describes the provenances summarizes some of the more famous sagas. I didn't know any of them well enough to judge the accuracy of the summaries, but the story-telling left a bit to be desired. The last section of the book describes the cosmology of the Norse world, the creation of the world, and Ragnarok, the end of the world.
Recommended for: Meh, there's got to be better Norse mythology books out there. Sagas is part of a series called Myth and Mankind that covers the mythologies and legends of cultures around the world. They look pretty cool, but if Sagas is a good representation of the series, I probably won't bother with the rest.
Parental worries: The Norse gods and heroes got up to some pretty weird stuff, but this book has a fairly clinical approach. If you'd like to err on the side of caution, check out D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths for the young ones (or even the old ones :-p it's been awhile since I read it, but it's probably a better book)
Ramblings:
I always feel bad after giving a book a bad review :-p it may be better than I'm giving it credit for, or maybe I just had the wrong expectations going into it. Sagas approaches mythology from the wrong angle, I think. It doesn't tell a story, doesn't create a world, merely presents the beliefs of a long-dead civilization. For example, who in their right minds puts the creation myth at the end of a book of mythology? It makes no sense! I realize that Norse mythology is nowhere near as well organized as Greek and that it doesn't follow much of a chronology, but that's not much of an excuse. It throws off the whole narrative, to wade into a bevvy of gods, goddesses, and giants with no notion of where they came from, how they're related, etc.
To it's credit, the book does have tons of good pictures and photographs, and the archaeological background is pretty nifty. It also takes the time to discuss the most important sources of information for the myths and sagas it relates, an angle that helps to show the somewhat disjointed nature of Norse mythology.
So, my third attempt turned out to be only slightly better than the first two. Does anyone have other suggestions? I should probably just stop mucking around and just pick up the translated sagas :-p
Labels: mythology, nonfiction
