Madeline Miller Talk

 This week I attended an author event and got a chance to meet Madeline Miller. She was brilliant. Funny, clever, engaging, the best-selling author knew how to speak to a crowd with ease. You could tell she’d taught for years and had the ability to make complicated discussions about women in Greek mythology feel relevant and accessible. I adored both of her books, Circe and The Song of Achilles, and can’t wait to see what she writes next. 

 I loved that she answered questions about her writing process and provided details about her research. She talked about how women are frequently made small in mythology and just used to further men’s stories. They are either the wife/mother/daughter of someone or they are a villain. It’s rare to find more meat to a female’s story.

She mentioned two poems, Ulysses by Tennyson and Penelope by Dorothy Parker (below) showing two very different views of their story. 

In the pathway of the sun,
In the footsteps of the breeze,
Where the world and sky are one,
He shall ride the silver seas,
He shall cut the glittering wave.
I shall sit at home, and rock;
Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock;
Brew my tea, and snip my thread;
Bleach the linen for my bed.
They will call him brave.

- Dorothy Parker

In Circe she gave voice to a character that was skated over in The Odyssey. She allowed her a messy life with complicated family relationships and a deep empathy toward humans. Miller shared that she directed Shakespeare’s plays in her free time and it took her five years to find each of her main characters’ voices while writing her novels. It was an incredible talk and one that gave an added depth to her work. 

One side note: this was my first night out after having my second kiddo. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to make it. Sitting there in that beautiful amphitheater and feeling my brain hum as I listened to her fascinating talk gave me so much satisfaction. After you have kids you can often feel like you are missing a piece of yourself. You are exhausted and rarely have time for intellectually stimulating pursuits. I just want to say that it does get better. Making time for the things that are important to you is just crucial. It is NOT easy, but it is so rewarding.

*Photos property of Avid Reader's Musings

Circe

Circe
by Madeline Miller
★★★★★

Circe is a witch on a remote island when Odysseus meets her on his journey home in Homer's Odyssey. In Miller’s reimagining she’s a complicated woman with heartaches and hopes of her own. She’s no longer a footnote in someone else’s story.

We meet Circe as a child in the halls of her Titan father. She never fits into his world of petty jealousy and swift anger. It's not until she's exiled to an island that she begins to figure out who she is. I loved the descriptions of the world where she lives. Whether she's digging in her garden or riding in her father's chariot above the earth, the descriptions bring each scene to life so vividly.

It’s a story of loneliness and longing. The beautiful language draws you in immediately. If you know any Greek mythology the characters will be familiar, but Miller gives them new depth. Just as she did in The Song of Achilles, she brings that ancient world alive and I couldn’t put it down.

BOTTOM LINE: Circe is such a wonderfully complex character. She is full of flaws and selfishness along side guilt and empathy. In this book there are no clear villains and heroes, just characters full of life and contradictions. I can’t wait to return to her world again one day.

“It is not fair,” I said. “It cannot be.”
“Those are two different things,” my grandmother said.

“In a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”

“Within him was an ocean’s worth of grief, which could only be stoppered a moment, never emptied.”

“It is youth’s gift not to feel its debts.”

“Those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats.”

Top 10 Contemporary Books Paired With a Classic

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for the top 10 contemporary books that would be great paired with a required reading book. I picked one classic and one recent book for each pair. 

1) Howards End and On Beauty: These two are an obvious match. One is a book about the unlikely meeting of two very different families and the other is a modern re-telling of the same story. The two are just different enough to feel completely unique.

2) Little Women and March (by Geraldine Brooks): Four women grow up with their mother while their father is away fighting the Civil War. Little Women is famous for barely mentioning the patriarch of the clan, March tells his story.

3) Flowers for Algernon and Marcelo in the Real World: Two men with mental limitations try to find their way in the world. Both are characters that get under your skin and stay with you long after the final page.

4) King Lear and A Thousand Acres: Shakespeare and Iowa don’t seem like an obvious pairing, but the tragedy of a king and his daughters works well when retold as a Midwestern farmer and his troubled family.

5) Babbit and The Corrections: I think I’ve made it clear that I do NOT enjoy Franzen, but this pairing shows what works and what doesn’t. Both are books about unhappy Midwestern families, one does it well; the other just comes across as whiny.

6) Gone with the Wind and The March (E.L. Doctorow): A classic about the downfall of the South paired with a book about Sherman’s march through the South, burning it down as he goes. Bonus: Vanity Fair would be another great classic to pair with Gone with the Wind. The two share so much, including a kind and gentle heroine who is best friends with a selfish and ambitious woman.

7) A Moveable Feast and The Paris Wife or French Milk: Hemingway’s memoir about his time in Paris in the 1920s pairs nicely with the fictional version of his wife’s life during that same period. It would also work perfectly with French Milk, a twenty-something’s graphic novel about her trip to Paris.

8) The Sign of Four and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective of all-time and a 10-year-old with impressive deductive skills. Both have a hard time with normal social interaction, but they always solve the case.

9) The Iliad and The Odyssey and The Song of Achilles: Greek epic poetry can be daunting, but paired with this love story the characters might become more accessible.

10) The Secret Garden and The Forgotten Garden: Two novels about secret gardens, one meant for kids, the other with a gothic mystery twist.

Greek Week: The Song of Achilles

The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

★★★★★

Greek mythology, character-driven narrative with an epic story, a heartbreaking love story, these are a few of my favorite things all piled into one beautiful book. I couldn’t put it down; I didn’t want it to end. I finally started reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology to slow my reading of this one.

Between The Odyssey, The Iliad, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and a college course on classical mythology, my knowledge of the Trojan War and the Greek heroes has been shaped and reshaped with different versions. Building on that base is this book, telling the story of Achilles and Patroclus. Throughout those other sources the pair has been painted as friends, brothers, lovers, etc. but one thing never changes: they are inseparable. They are dearer to each other than their own lives.

The first half of the book is the story of how they meet and the beginning of their friendship. The second half is the well-known story of the Trojan War. It’s retold through Patroclus’ eyes, which gives the whole tale a very different spin. All the familiar faces are there: Agamemnon, Odyssey, Hector, Paris, Zeus, Athena, etc., but many of them feel slightly different in this version.

Patroclus himself is a thoughtful, sensitive boy. He’s so unlike the other Greek warriors when it comes to brute strength, but his strength comes in a very different form. He’s willing to love against all odds, even when he knows it will end in a broken heart.

The reason this retelling resonated with me in such a powerful way is because of the characters themselves. Miller makes them so relatable. You feel for them in a way that you usually don't when you read books on classical mythology.

Chiron and Briseis particularly stood out for me. Chiron is a centaur who trains both Achilles and Patroclus for years in his rose-colored cave on a mountain-side. He is wise and kind and his home is a peaceful one, a complete change from the battle driven world they had become accustomed to. Briseis on the other hand is brought into Patroclus’ world in the midst of a bloody war. She is a prize from battle, but their friendship blossoms despite the circumstances and we see the best of Patroclus because of her.

BOTTOM LINE: I loved it. Sometimes a book lives up to the hype and this one did for me. I can’t say that you’d feel the same if you don’t already like Greek Mythology, but it was an absolute treat for me.

“Did he know, or only guess at Achilles’ destiny? Perhaps he simply assumed: a bitterness of habit, of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder.”

**One quick note about the kindle version. There was one incredibly helpful feature that really enhanced my reading experience. The character’s name were highlighted and when you clicked on them it took you to a screen with a drawing (see above) and a summary of the character’s part in Greek mythology.

Other Thoughts:

Iris on Books

Fizzy Thoughts 

The Sleepless Reader 

What She Read

Booklust
Book Pairing 
Necromancy Never Pays

Greek Week Announcement

This is sort of a grown-up bibliophile’s version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. At the beginning of the month I started The Song of Achilles for Care’s readalong. I was loving it, but I was also reading it too fast. It made me think about all the tales of Greek mythology I’d read over the years and all the ones I hadn’t. So I got my copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology off the shelf and started reading it.

That led me to start thinking about all the different movies I’d seen that were set in ancient Greece. This was a slippery slope because there are tons of them; some good and some awful, but usually fun!

Then I remembered how much I’d enjoyed Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series and that he had a new series I’d wanted to check out. So I got The Lost Hero (the first book in that series), from the library.

Then I remembered I needed to read a play for Fanda’s Let’s Read Plays monthly challenge. And that led me to another Greek book, The Oresteia play trilogy by Aeschylus.  

So anyway, things got out of control quickly and I was surrounded by a stack of Greek themed books and Greek Week was born! I decided to post about all the crazy gods and their wrath and sneakiness throughout this week to share my craziness with all of you.

And I’ve now learned that if you give a bibliophile a good book on a topic they love, there’s no telling where they’ll end up.

Images from here, here and here.