Just Readin'

I was first introduced to The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff by the movie version of the book, The Eagle . The Eagle was a great movie, mostly because it involved face paint and Channing Tatum. So, after I saw it, I decided to read the book, and, after I read the book, I hated the movie, because the book was so much better. The Eagle of the Ninth tells the story of a Roman centurion, Marcus, stationed in Roman Britain. Marcus comes from a long line of soldiers. His father marched with the Ninth Legion, which disappeared in the old Roman province of Valentia. Marcus is haunted by the memory of his father's legion and longs to lift this shame from his family's name. After Marcus is injured in battle and forced to leave the army, he decides to journey north of Hadrian's wall to try to recover the lost Eagle of his father's legion. What follows is a stunning adventure that spans the length of Britain. The story is that the author actually based the book o...

So, the other day I was on Facebook, you know, like your typical college student with three billion pages to read a night, and I found one of those list challenge where you go through a list of things and mark all the things on the list you've done. Anyway, I found one that was called '50 Books to Read Before You Die'. Anyway, I read a lot, so I thought it I would try it, but out of 50, I'd only read 19, and, while most of the books on the list are famous and well known and note-worthy, I don't think my life would be significantly different if I hadn't read Frankenstein. Which, by the way, was like the dullest book I've ever read. I don't really like this whole idea of list of "necessary" books. It's hard to create a list of books that everyone should read before they die because, obviously, not everyone likes the same sort of thing. That's not to say that I don't think dark or boring books can be valuable. For examp...

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...

So, I think everyone in the world can agree that The Scottish Play is top-shelf bard. To my understanding, it is the play against which all other tragedies and histories (you could make the argument that Macbeth is a history, don't fight me on this) are measured (except for Richard III , nothing beats Richard III ). There are a lot of reasons why The Scottish Play is the classic that it is, a lot of reasons that scholars love to analyze it. But my favorite thing about Macbeth is that it's so, so, very weird (as in strange, not as in the Weird Sisters - hang on, we're getting there). Seriously; it's bizarre! I know that in a world that contains alligator hot dogs, the vampire birth scene in Breaking Dawn , and the English system, everything else seems fairly normal, but, it you consider it, Macbeth is a really strange play. There are apparitions, witches, and ghosts; at various times in the play, horses eat each other and chimneys are blown down by the force of one...

So, if you're ever upset because you've done something that you regret, then you should read Euripides' Medea , because nothing you could ever do could be as bad as what happens in Medea . As you know, I've been reading a lot of Greek tragedy, but their is nothing more Greek or more tragic than this play. Medea is the story of Medea, the wife of Jason (as in Jason and the Argonauts). The backstory is a little complicated, but basically what happens is that Medea betrays her family to help Jason and, in exchange, he marries her and they have two sons. They go to Corinth, where Jason precedes to abandon Medea in order to marry the daughter of the king. Medea's very logical response to this is to kill her children and Jason's new wife. Obviously, there's some nuance I'm skipping over, but that's pretty much the gist of it. Like, seriously, Edgar Allan Poe couldn't make this stuff up. Aside from all the gore, however, this is an interesting ...

So, today, I finished reading Beowulf for one of my English classes. In case you've never heard of it, Beowulf is an old English, epic-poem about a Scandinavian warrior named Beowulf. Most people think it's one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature. Apparently, it's been quite a week for Anglo-Saxon poetry. Anyway, as you know, I like Anglo-Saxon poetry, so I've tried to read it before, but I could never get through it. Which is weird, because it's not like it's a boring story or anything. It's actually a very good story. I tried to read it on my own before, and I've had to read parts of it for classes before, but it's very slow going. Anyway, when it was assigned for my English class, I decided that this time I was going to read it completely, no matter what. Anyway, I started reading it and I found myself getting lost in the complicated prose, unpronounceable names, and references to obscure events.  I realized that, normally,...