Gods Make Me Crazy

I got into mythology at a young age, and I’m into it now more than ever. This past weekend we devoted many hours to a five-team game of Risk: Godstorm in which I subdued my opponents with an endless litany about the gods they had in play. I also enjoyed reading Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips. This is a bawdy book that delivers on its title, but it could also have been called “Mortals Behaving Boldly,” as two run-of-the-mill mortals accomplish a Herculean task that not even the gods could pull off: restoring belief. Phillips relocates the pantheon of Greek Gods to modern day London, where they share a decaying house and live indefinitely in degradation. Not even illicit encounters between the most physically attractive gods, Apollo and Aphrodite, can add any excitement to their tedious passing of endless days. Only when they encounter a cleaning woman named Alice and her mousy friend Neil are they able to regain their former glorified status. Phillips is bold in her writing as well, dedicating this wickedly amusing book to her parents!

One of my thoughtful sales reps provided me with a review copy of Z is for Zeus: a Greek Mythology Alphabet, a fairly safe investment considering my interest in the subject and my moonlighting as a father of three kids. I was prepared to jump on board with this book until I came across a factual error (the form of a harpy was attributed to a siren). Instantly the enchantment was broken and I was right back in my eighth grade English class, correcting my teacher’s mistakes. It’s a shame that a simple missed fact check can lay low all the might of Olympus, but I could not bring myself to order any copies (I did order A is for Arches from the same product line, however).

Maps and Legends review

Regrettably this book will not join Chabon’s extensive list of best sellers and award winners, but what is the point of garnering all of those accolades except to be able to publish a book like this? Maps and Legends is ostensibly a collection of essays on the dual (and sometimes dueling) arts of reading and writing literature, but the overall effect is greater than the sum of its parts. The whimsical cover (I’ll elaborate no further; find a copy and discover the secret on your own) and quirky acknowledgments page are perfectly suited for this marvelous and marveling book.

Unlike Gentlemen of the Road (reviewed here on 3/17/08), this is not a book that can be read twice in one week; time must be spent savoring each essay before moving on to the next. I must confess that I skipped ahead to “Ragnarok Boy,” but that is in keeping with the spirit of the book: maps present more than just a singular, undeviating linear route to all destinations. Imagine my delight to find that, like C.S. Lewis, Chabon became devoted to Loki at a young age! That was not my own experience, as my introduction to Thor and Loki came in the pages of Marvel Comics rather than the genuine Norse mythology. As I mentioned in my essay “Satellite, Part II,” I read Myths of the Norsemen by H.A. Guerber while recuperating from the surgical repair of my Achilles tendon. As such, when it came to Ragnarok I identified most not with the predictable Thor or the devious Loki but with Vidar, the silent giant who plants his enormous reinforced boot on the lower jaw of the wolf Fenris and tears asunder the horrible beast that felled Odin. Loki the Trickster is a fitting choice for the admiration of an aspiring author, and all too appropriate for the theme of this book. The gods put their trust in him at their own peril, yet they could not resist the company of one so entertaining. I’ve just now recognized the parallels between Thor and Loki and the title characters in my own book, Orlando and Geoffrey. As Chabon states, “All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”

I cannot claim Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or M.R. James, authors discussed by Chabon, among my own influences, but I have added Philip Pullman and Cormac McCarthy to my reading list as a result of his thorough examination of their work. I can also relate to Chabon’s treatment of the genre and sub-genre issue. I’ve dealt with this as an author who never intended to write fantasy adventure and science fiction stories. I’ve also dealt with it as a book buyer; there have been books I have bypassed altogether for the sole reason that I could not fit them tidily into the store’s system of classification. That is a shame we are trying to redress. Even the term “Fiction and Literature” seems double-edged and derogatory. Books ought not to be constrained by classifications, and Maps and Legends will challenge any and all classification systems.

Fall Favorites

It’s already August and I have yet to hit bottom on my stack of Fall catalogs, but I am ready to anoint my Fall Favorites. My favorite catalog this season was without a doubt that of the Harvard University Press. That’s not to say I ordered more from it than any other catalog, but it definitely kept me more engaged than anything else I saw this season. Of course I acknowledge that a university bookstore is likely biased towards academic presses, but I’m talking about the assortment and design of the catalog itself. The staff of Harvard University Press know what they’re doing. Innovative design is the reason I picked Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far by Stefan Sagmeister as my Fall Favorite Book. Not only are Sagmeister’s creations innovative, but the book that showcases them joins them as a reworking of an everyday item into something extraordinary. The fifteen folios have individual covers and the casing has a porous face, allowing the reader to customize the look of the book (I’ve included an extra large picture of one of the possible covers to highlight this feature). Inside the folios are the typographical displays Sagmeister created to state the aphorisms he began writing in his diary, along with a brief explanation of each one. One of the sayings, “If I want to explore a new direction professionally, it is helpful to try it out for myself first,” is written in multiple scripts using sugar. In his exposition Sagmeister wrote that “if [the sugar] was too willful, I would punish the sugar by licking it up.” For me this book was an introduction to the work of Stefan Sagmeister, and it was a delight.  The only drawback is that it must be shrink wrapped to protect it from over-handling, which requires a customer to purchase it practically sight unseen.

Audio Books

You’ve heard all of the arguments already, so I’ll just say that I am the type of reader who enjoys the tactile experience of holding the book as I read it. That does not mean that I have ruled out audio books entirely, however. I have experimented with audio books a couple of times, with mixed results. I was not bold enough to invest any money into my first audio book experience, so I went to my local library. I checked out The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, a book I had not read. I may have to read it yet, as the first disc would not play. I returned to the library undaunted and checked out a Star Wars audio book next. That book was also difficult to listen to – not because the disc wouldn’t play, but because it was a dramatization, and a poor one at that. I wrote my experiment off as a failure and moved on. Recently I tried again, this time with podcasts supplanting the library. I downloaded the Random House Audio Podcast and the HarperCollins Prosecast and listened to them during my morning commute. I found it interesting to listen to the sample of Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt while watching it pass by from the window of the train, but the sample of Invincible, the final book in the Star Wars: Legacy of the Force series, was another intolerable dramatization. I didn’t care for the interview with Brunonia Barry, author of The Lace Reader, either, but that had nothing to do with the author or her book; it was the over-the-top tone of host Cathi Bond that bothered me. Despite the mixed results of my experiments, today I purchased my first audio book: The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, read by Christopher Lee. I have reviewed this book previously on this blog, and the audio version cannot take the place of the print version. It can supplement it, however. I loved the book so much that I am excited to listen to Lee, the actor who played Saruman in The Lord of the Rings films, read it with his very proper pronunciation. That is the my solution to the audio book problem, at any rate.

Stalking Irish Madness review

A natural follow up to My Father’s Paradise, this book is also written by a journalist investigating his family’s heritage. Patrick Tracey traveled to Ireland instead of Iraq, searching for the origins of schizophrenia rather than Jewish tradition, but ultimately the two books share a similar theme: personal reconciliation to a previously rejected familial trait. The stark difference in the two stories is that Sabar could converse with his primary source, his father, whereas Tracey could not. Schizophrenia afflicted his grandmother, uncle, and two of his sisters, but none of them could help him understand why. This incurable mental illness cast its pall over every member of Tracey’s family, and not even leaving the country could get Tracey away from it. So Tracey turned back, traveling throughout Ireland in a quest to redeem himself, if not his sisters. Tracing his grandmother’s line back another three generations, Tracey found an ancestor, Mary Egan, who emigrated to the United States during the potato famine. By the time she arrived she was schizophrenic, and she handed the illness down in her genes. This book recounts both the dead ends and the discoveries Tracey found as he ran the gamut from scientists to local historians to schizophrenia support groups in Ireland, a nation with a disproportionately large population of schizophrenics and the folklore to match.