Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Retellings/Folklore-Inspired Tales

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a freebie, so I decided to highlight one of my favorite subgenres...retellings! There is so much potential in taking a look at stories we already know and changing the perspective on them.

Wicked: Gregory Maguire has made a career of retellings, but his first was this take on the Wicked Witch that is so much deeper and richer than the musical (which is also fantastic in its own way). 

The Bear and the Nightingale: There's a kind of vague Cinderella aspect to this, but the real treat is the Russian folklore, alongside an incredible heroine and a wonderful story that continues over two sequels.

Polite Society: I just recently read this take on Emma, transported to modern day India, and found it really enjoyable, striking a great balance between the broad strokes of the original while still telling its own story.

Ella Enchanted: Teenage me loved this YA spin on Cinderella where she's cursed to always be obedient.

The Song of Achilles: I did not especially enjoy reading The Iliad. But I did enjoy reading this take on it that posits Achilles and Patroclus as a long-term, committed couple.

Boy, Snow, Bird: I did not love one of the concluding "twists" of this book, inspired by Snow White, but until then had found it complicated and rich and interesting.

The Red Tent: Dinah, only daughter of the biblical Jacob, is barely a footnote in the Bible, but this book takes her portrayal there and fleshes it out with life and love and sorrow and joy.

Lamb: This is another retelling of a Bible story, but takes on a much more prominent character...Jesus himself, given a dumbass best friend called Biff, who narrates the "real" story of the Son of God. 

Bridget Jones's Diary: It's a pretty loose take on Pride and Prejudice, but I love this book. So few "funny" books actually work for me and it's hilarious.

The King Must Die: I super loved Greek mythology growing up, and the religious aspects of this retelling of the story of Theseus made for a fascinating read.

American Gods: Neil Gaiman's vivid imagination brings together the spirits of mythological tradition from all over the world to face off with "the new gods" to which society has dedicated itself (media, technology, etc).

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Retellings/Folklore-Inspired Tales

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books Released In the Last Ten Years

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're taking a look back at the past ten years and choosing our favorite books for each one! Some of these ended up being pretty hard choices!

2018: Once Upon A River- I loved this book, which was consciously meta about the power of storytelling but without losing the magic.

2017: The Bear and the Nightingale- By far, my favorite series of the past decade. Each one of the books is fantastic, and the first one especially so...I got completely immersed in the world of Russian folklore it creates!

2016: The Queen of the Night- This book is completely bonkers. Sweeping, epic, entertaining, and with the most delightfully crazy plot twists.

2015: Dead Wake- I knew like nothing about the Lusitania (besides that it had sunk) and precious little about World War 1 and got SO into this.

2014: Station Eleven- This book isn't just about a world-decimating flu and its immediate aftermath, but how humanity continues to survive even more than a decade later and even if you don't think you like post-apocalyptic fiction, you should read this.

2013: Americanah- If someone hasn't recommended that you read this book about an African couple whose immigration journeys take very different paths by now, let me be that person. If you just haven't read it yet, let me encourage you to get to it. It's amazing.

2012: Devil in the Grove- It's one thing to read about Jim Crow and police brutality during that era in the abstract, but this account of young black men in Florida falsely accused of rape in the 1950s is searing and fascinating and eye-opening.

2011: The Song of Achilles- This retelling of the story of mighty Greek warrior Achilles, in which his loyal servant Patroclus is actually his partner, has a power that lingers long after reading.

2010: The Man Without A Face- Masha Gessen's nonfiction look at Russia and its leader is relevant and completely enthralling.

2009: Wolf Hall- There are so many Tudor stories out there, it's hard to think of a fresh angle on the drama of Henry VIII's reign. But Hilary Mantel's look at it from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell manages to do just that masterfully.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books Released In the Last Ten Years

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Characters Worth Following

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we're looking at characters that would make great leaders, so here are ten characters that I think would be worth following.

Hermione Granger (Harry Potter): The Harry Potter series would have been, like, one book long without Hermoine making sure Harry and Ron didn't kill themselves by accident. She is smart, capable, and I would be more than happy to follow her wherever she went.

Lyra Belacqua (The Golden Compass): Lyra's just one of those "natural leaders"...it's no accident that when the Jordan College kids are fighting the townie kids, that it's Lyra that leads them into battle. Her natural charisma is obvious even on the page.

Gandalf (The Fellowship of the Ring): When the Fellowship sets off on their quest, it's the wizard that leads them...in part to quell arguments between the races about leadership, but also because he's wise and thoughtful and anyone who's beloved in Hobbiton is someone I'd be okay trailing behind.

Madeline Mackenzie (Big Little Lies): After reading this book (I still haven't seen the show and I really need to!), I so appreciated Madeline's take-charge attitude that I'd have happily joined her book club (or anything else she wanted me to).

Charles O'Keefe (A Wrinkle In Time): While Meg is my favorite character from this series, she's too short-tempered to make a good leader. Leaders are most effective if they're liked, and who wouldn't like and line up behind Charles?

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): England in Austen's time didn't have a lot in the way of formal leadership roles for women, but clever Emma was clearly the queen bee of her social set, which is about as much as an upper-class lady could aspire to.

Mr. Wednesday (American Gods): There's a reason he's the one that goes on the journey to round up the old gods across the country...he's the one that's got the persuasiveness to get them to join up!

Achilles (Song of Achilles): He's a strong, true, and fair commander of his troops, who wouldn't want to follow him...and who would care that he's gay, for that matter?

Ned Stark (A Game of Thrones): Noble, brave, and always doing the right thing, Ned is pretty much the platonic ideal of a hero and a worthy leader.

Jean Valjean (Les Miserables): He spends most of his life repenting for a criminal act by becoming selfless and kind and the kind of man who gets elected to be the mayor of his town.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Characters Worth Following

Book 63: Song of Achilles

"The never-ending ache of love and sorrow. Perhaps in some other life I could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, and made him face his choice alone. But not in this one. He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death."

Dates read: June 20-23, 2016

Rating: 7/10

If you've been to school in the Western world, you've probably at some point read (or at least been assigned to read) parts of The Iliad and The Odyssey. I've "read" them (some actual reading supplemented by SparkNoting) and I honestly don't get the hype. The Odyssey is the better of the two for me, and I can understand better its enduring appeal: an adventure story with a charming and quick-witted hero. The Iliad though...war stories don't traditionally move me, and this one just bored me to tears.

But for better or for worse, the Homeric epics are a bedrock part of the Western literary canon. Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles looks at The Iliad from a fresh perspective: that of Patroclus, Achilles' closest companion. Since this is a retelling of a classic story (a genre to which I am predisposed), we already know how it's going to play out: Agamemnon will steal a slave girl claimed by Achilles, leading to the hero refusing to fight for the Greeks, leading to Patroclus donning his armor and being slain by Hector of Troy, leading to Achilles killing Hector and dragging him around the walls of his city, only to be killed himself by an arrow from Hector's brother Paris. What's different is what comes before and between.

As most of us know, it was not uncommon in Ancient Greek life for older men to have sexual relationships with younger men. Homosexual relationships between men of the same age, however, were rarer. When I was taught The Iliad, even in college, the bond between Patroclus and Achilles was usually described as just a deep friendship (lip service was paid to the idea they could have been lovers but it was never taught as being the more persuasive interpretation). Miller's novel, however, roots itself in the alternate interpretation: she presents us with Achilles, the most gifted warrior in Greece, as a man in a loving and stable lifelong relationship with Patroclus.

It would actually be more accurate to say she presents us with Patroclus as the romantic partner of Achilles: the story belongs to Patroclus, it is told through his eyes. Patroclus as created by Miller is a gentle soul, a disappointment to his aggressive father, who is banished when he kills another child purely by accident. He is sent to Peleus, father of Achilles, to be fostered, and is chosen by Achilles of all the young men at court to be his companion. Their relationship only gradually becomes romantic, much to the disgust of Achilles' river goddess mother, Thetis. She conspires more than once to break the couple apart, but their love is too strong and they remain together until the end. Miller explains Achilles' rage over the theft of his slave girl as being not about being deprived of a lover, but as being disrespected as the greatest soldier in the army by having his rightfully-claimed prize taken away.

I found it a much more enjoyable take on the story than the original. Miller really gets the time to develop Patroclus and Achilles as characters in depicting them from boyhood all the way through adulthood. She paints a very devoted relationship between them: though both briefly experiment with sex with women, they never stray from each other and Achilles refuses to leave Patroclus despite strong maternal pressure to do so. Since Miller's Patroclus isn't a skilled or enthusiastic warrior and instead serves the Greek contingent at Troy as a healer, most of the battlefield scenes that I find so boring to read are left out entirely. This is a solid read for fans of historical fiction and/or classical retellings.

Tell me, blog friends...did you have to read the Homeric poems in school at any point? Did you like them more than I did?

One year ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 63: Song of Achilles