100 books like The Horse Goddess

Born and raised in Greece, I have always been fascinated by the history and mythology of my homeland. My love for reading historical fiction and Greek myths has been drawing me into stories of ancient civilizations and their timeless tales. Visiting archaeological sites and museums, where history comes to life through the remnants of the past has been a lifelong passion and Is a source of inspiration. These experiences have shaped my love for storytelling and my desire to breathe new life into Greek myths and history. In my writing, I aim to bridge the gap between the ancient and the modern.

I daylight as a lawyer, moonlight as a stand-up comic and gaslight as a storyteller. A connoisseur of mythology and momos, I have often wondered how our ancient tales might have unfolded if narrated from women’s perspectives - a curiosity kindled since I listened to my grandmother’s grievances even as she regaled me with these stories. In the same breadth, I could not help but see how harmful and reductionist “evil” labels can be especially when history is chronicled only by victors. It is this quest of humanizing the vanquished and the vilified while honouring the essence of a timeless epic that led me to play a medieval matchmaker by wedding Indian Lore to Italian Renaissance.

After “the environmental crisis” came to popular attention in the 1960s, American Indians were portrayed as having a legacy of traditional environmental ethics. We wanted to know if this were true. But how to gain access to ideas of which there is no written record? Answer: analyze stories, which have a life of their own, handed down from one generation to the next going all the way back to a time before European contact, colonization, and cultural, as well as murderous, genocide. And the stories do reveal indigenous North American environmental ethics (plural). That’s what American Indian Environmental Ethics: An Ojibwa Case Study demonstrates.

I've been interested in feminine figures since I was a small, Catholic child presented with the Virgin Mary! Further down the road in graduate school and in my teaching career as an English Professor at a small Liberal Arts college, I began to research comparative mythology and the study of archetypes with a particular emphasis on the female divine. Now, after publishing three books and several articles on the goddesses, I'm happy to help others in their journey of discovery. I believe a good way to approach that study today is to focus on how our contemporary women writers portray goddesses in their works of fiction and non-fiction.

I have been a student of Druidry since the mid-1990s and I have also had a passion for history and mythology since I received a children’s version of “The Twelve Labours of Hercules” when I was around 7 years old. I’ve read pretty much all the major stories and texts in relation to Celtic myth and Druid lore (particularly from Ireland). I have spent the last 20 years studying the remains of Irish Druidism and how to incorporate it into modern practice is a respectful but relevant way.

Like Neil Gaiman, I came to Norse mythology via the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Marvel comics route. And when I explored the material further I was struck by the darkness and unsanitised oddity of many of the stories. They clearly reflected the Vikings’ view of the world as a cold, hostile, sometimes absurd place that must be met with a strong arm and a hearty laugh if one is to survive not only physically but mentally. There’s something refreshingly honest about such an approach, and when I came to write the third novel in my Pantheon series, The Age of Odin, which recast the myths as a modern military-SF thriller, I leaned heavily into the aspects I found the most appealing as well as the most dramatic, not least the snowy apocalypse that is Ragnarök, while injecting some appropriately ribald humour too.

My passion for Celtic cultures, languages, and traditions comes from my family, where singing and storytelling were common. I worked as a singer and musician, and trained in Celtic Studies through Harvard University. That was an amazing experience, and research in Scotland and Ireland expanded my knowledge tremendously. I taught Celtic literature, mythology, and folklore at numerous colleges, and am Expert Contributor in Iron Age Pagan Celtic Religion for the Database of Religious History at the University of British Columbia, and invited Old Irish translator for the upcoming Global Medieval Sourcebook at Stanford University. I wake up every day excited to share the historical realities of these amazing cultures and beliefs!

Books have been an important part of my faith journey. I set aside time each morning to read scripture, and devotional material, to meditate and pray. As I read about the experiences of others my faith increases and I know God better. As a writer I express my own faith through words and invite others to know God better by experiencing Him with time set aside in the mornings. More Love is part of a series of small books that I have created to give readers experiences to connect with God and to know His love. 

Sheila Finch is best known as a Nebula-winning author of science fiction, but on a visit back to her first alma mater in Chichester, UK, she encountered a mystery that wouldn’t let her go. Who built the nearby magnificent Roman palace that was just now being excavated at Fishbourne, and why? Months of research later, she came up with a possible explanation that involved a sixteen-year-old Roman mother, a middle-aged Celtic king of a small tribe, and Emperor Nero’s secret plans:

I have been a student of Druidry since the mid-1990s and I have also had a passion for history and mythology since I received a children’s version of “The Twelve Labours of Hercules” when I was around 7 years old. I’ve read pretty much all the major stories and texts in relation to Celtic myth and Druid lore (particularly from Ireland), sometimes in multiple versions, so I think I have a fair idea of what is useful or worth reading.