Just Readin'

So, I just finished reading The Trojan Women by Euripides (I don't know if you can tell, but I'm a bit of a Euripides fan) and it raised an interesting question for me: can we blame Helen for the fall of Troy? If you don't know, The Trojan Women explores the aftermath of the sack of Troy, particularly what happens to the women of Troy, who have been taken as slaves by the Greek soldiers. Both the Trojans and the Greeks feel that Helen is responsible for the war (for good reason), but Helen herself argues that she is innocent. Helen tells Menelaus that Aphrodite made her run off with Paris and that after Paris was dead she tried to go back to Menelaus. That sounds like a pretty lame excuse to me, but it doesn't seem fair that the entire war should be blamed on Helen either. Depending on the source, I've come across two different versions of the Helen of Troy story, one that says she was kidnapped and one that says she went willingly. Personally, I can't ima...

I realized today that it's been a while since I wrote one of these favorite book blogs. So, today I want to tell you about The Voyage of the Dawn Treader . The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is one of the books in The Chronicles of Narnia series, technically, it's the third book in the series (in publication order), but it makes the most sense to read it as the fourth book. It frustrates me that, when people think of The Chronicles of Narnia , they automatically think of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe . Not to say that it's not a great book, but the Narnia books are so much more interesting, so much more complex that. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is so monumental in scope . They made a movie version of it, but it didn't really capture what the book was all about. They tried to make it an adventure story, which it is, but it's so much more than that. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we see so much more of Narnia than ever before. It really begins to tak...