Becoming immersed in oral cultures was a massive wake-up call for me! Taught to privilege the written over the spoken word, as most literate people are, it took me years of living in the Pacific Islands, travelling regularly to their remoter parts, to appreciate that people who could neither read nor write could retain huge amounts of information in their heads – and explain it effortlessly. We undervalue orality because we are literate, but that is an irrational prejudice. And as I have discovered from encounters with oral traditions throughout Australia and the Pacific, India, and northwest Europe, not only are oral traditions extensive but may be thousands of years old.
When I first read this book, not only was I struck by its central theme that ‘myths’ have meaning but also by the fact that it is our problem that we cannot today recognize myths for what they once were. All oral traditions evolve through time, sometimes over thousands of years and across hundreds of generations of retelling, but if their core is sufficiently memorable, then it can remain recognizable. It is up to us to unpack the stories we hear today, to learn how they changed through time, and try to see whether there is an empirical core in their hearts. This book is a must for anyone interested in learning more about the meaning of ‘myth’ rather than romanticizing it.
Why were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since dragons don't exist? Strange though they sound, however, these "myths" did not begin as fiction. This absorbing book shows that myths originally transmitted real information about real events and observations, preserving the information sometimes for millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists' interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago created Oregon's Crater Lake, for example, is echoed point for point in the…
I saw my first Godzilla movie when I was seven years old, and I immediately fell in love: what kid doesn’t want to be a giant radioactive monster with attitude? But unlike baseball cards, I never outgrew Godzilla and, over the decades, came to appreciate the cultural significance of one of the world’s most enduring film icons. In my writing on Godzilla, I explore my own fascination with monsters and contemplate why all societies, from the dawn of time to today, have compulsively created imaginary creatures that terrify them. The books on this list have helped me understand the human obsession with monsters, and I hope you will find them equally enlightening and enjoyable.
I am generally not a big fan of hardcore academic theory, but this collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen gave me a steady stream of "aha!" moments when I first read it about twenty years ago.
I struggled a bit with some of the jargon here, not to mention the fact that it only deals with monsters in the Western tradition, but I know of no better book for helping readers understand why humans create (and need) monsters, what roles monsters play in affirming (and undermining) social norms, and what the study of monsters can reveal about the anxieties and fault-lines in the cultures that spawn them. “Monsters are our children,” Cohen writes at one point: that still blows my mind after two decades of chewing on it.
Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argues the essays in this wide-ranging collection that asks the question, what happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture? In viewing the monstrous body as metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of very real fears and desires, signs of cultural unease that pervade society and shape its collective behaviour. Through a sampling of monsters as a conceptual category, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies…
Today, I teach fantasy at the University of Maryland, but I’ve been hooked on Tolkien from a young age. As a kid, I was wary that serious study of Tolkien might “destroy the magic,” but decades spent in strange corners of Tolkien’s invented universe have only deepened my appreciation for the inexhaustible depth of his sub-creation—it’s simply steeped in a profound sense of untold stories. I hope you enjoy digging in as much as I have.
I loved this book because it illuminated Tolkien’s lifelong fascination with Beowulf, probably his greatest influence. The translation is good, but the commentary is better, and the inclusion of two short works, Sellic Spell and the Lay of Beowulf, showed me Tolkien’s delight in “re-tellings.”
His creative genius was seldom far removed from his scholarly work.
The translation of Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien was an early work, very distinctive in its mode, completed in 1926: he returned to it later to make hasty corrections, but seems never to have considered its publication.
This edition is twofold, for there exists an illuminating commentary on the text of the poem by the translator himself, in the written form of a series of lectures given at Oxford in the 1930s; and from these lectures a substantial selection has been made, to form also a commentary on the translation in this book.
I never outgrew the curiosity of wanting to know more about the things we fear. Plenty of monsters are just neat! But the more you learn about them, whether they’re animals like bears and sharks or figures of myth like werewolves and dragons, the more interesting they become. I wanted to take audiences deep inside a skin unlike their own so they could understand how it feels to be cast out and how much a monster might look down on us. Because the more you look at monsters, the more you recognize us in them.
One of the classic novels about monsters having internal lives. Grendel doesn’t even survive the first half of the Beowulf poem.
But what was his life like? This creature who went into rages over music and merriment? This outsider who clearly had no one to commune with? Where there could just be pathos, Gardner injects surprising dorkiness and humor that further round out Grendel’s existence. And there’s a huge bonus in the poem’s dragon also showing up as an utter weirdo neighbor.
This classic and much lauded retelling of Beowulf follows the monster Grendel as he learns about humans and fights the war at the center of the Anglo Saxon classic epic.
"An extraordinary achievement."—New York Times
The first and most terrifying monster in English literature, from the great early epic Beowulf, tells his own side of the story in this frequently banned book. This is the novel William Gass called "one of the finest of our contemporary fictions."
Poems irritated me as a child. They seemed parodies of counting, chants of rhythm, and repetition. I included them in my moratorium against reading fiction. On the other hand, I respected the alphabet, a kind of poem of pure form. It was orderly for no good reason and didn't mean anything. So I concluded that poems were meaningless forms that had their uses, but were not serious. I changed my mind, but it took a while—studying math and science, theology, and then philosophy and literature. I'm now a professor who studies and teaches modern literature and philosophy. I got my Ph.D. from Harvard, became a professor at Stanford, and teach at the University of Dallas.
I could suggest any number of poems and poets of our everyday fate of being lost and found. But for me the modern poet who best integrates the eye seeing with the mind questioning is the great A.R. Ammons.
I have listed just Volume 1 of his collected poems, but I also recommend Volume 2. He writes out of a consciousness that poems are found and shaped out of a life of observation, effort, and passion.
A.R. Ammons produced some of the twentieth century's most innovative and enduring poetry, collected here for the first time in its entirety. Volume I follows Ammons's development through his National Book Award-winning Collected Poems 1951-1971 and his daring work of the 1970s. The second volume rounds out Ammons's rich middle phase and startling later work, including the posthumously published Bosh and Flapdoodle.
The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons offers authoritative texts of every published poem and includes over one hundred previously uncollected poems by "unquestionably among the best-loved poets of our time" (David Lehman).
I have been fascinated with travel and adventure stories since I read The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. I finished a whole Walter Scott book; with a dictionary balanced on one knee because Jeanie Deans decides to walk from Edinburgh to London. Romance? Bah! Humbug! I’d rather journey into The Heart of Darkness, follow the hobbits to Mount Doom, or ride a sandworm with Paul Atreides. Show me a lone traveler thrown into the middle of an unfamiliar, confusing culture and you have my full attention. Naturally, when I started typing out my first manuscript, it just had to be a fantasy adventure about an Iban headhunter.
This book is a re-interpretation of the epic saga of Beowulf, re-imagining him as a real-life hero who fought in a historical human world. The magic of this story is that it is hard to tell where facts end and story begins. Ahmad, the narrator, is opinionated in a dry and pedagogic way. He complains about many things but, like a true traveler, refuses little. Even though he regales us with his sense of superiority, his outward manner is meek and passive which helps him get along with the Northmen. Please don’t read this book in a public library if you do not want to be shush-ed. Some of Ahmad’s commentaries on Viking life have sent me into loud, sudden guffaws.
The Eaters of the Dead is a brilliant, stirring tale of historical adventure which deserves a place on readers bookshelves alongside Michael Crichton's bestselling techno-thrillers.
It is AD922 and Ibn Fadlan is sent north from Baghdad as a peaceful ambassador. But before he reaches his destination, he falls in with some Vikings and when they are attacked by mystical bloodthirsty creatures in the midst of a terrible fog, he reluctantly agrees to become the prophesied 13th warrior in order for them to survive.
Later turned into a major Hollywood film, Eaters of the Dead is an imaginative and breathlessly exciting…
While I’ve been a voraciously omnivorous reader my whole life, I’ve always been drawn most to stories that take me into the darkest of dark places, and that sometimes leave me there, alone and without a light. Horror, weird fiction, and the contemporary gothic all have a permanent home in my heart, and they’re the genres in which I most like to play as a writer. Most of all, I love those dark stories that stretch boundaries and defy conventions, that wield language as the beautifully vicious weapon it can be, and challenge me to do the same.
You don’t have to know Beowulfto enjoy this modern-day re-imagining – set in a gated community at the foot of a mined-out mountain with subterranean caves and lakes a plenty – but the novel serves up delicious layers for readers familiar with the Old English epic. Headley weaves a story that is horrific and beautiful in equal measure as she explores the gulf between the experiences of two very different mothers – Dana, an ex-soldier barely surviving in the wilderness with her son Gren; and Willa Herot, suburban royalty living a luxurious if socially pressurised existence, protected her wealthy husband’s power. With writing that oscillates between lyrical poetics and prose that is sparse, blunt, and direct, The Mere Wife is a darkly fabulous novel that I look forward to reading over and over again.
A fierce, feminist retelling of the classic tale Beowulf.
Gren and his mother, Dana, a war veteran, live on the side of a mountain, next to Herot Hall, a pristine gated community ruled over by Willa and her son, Dylan. Separated by high gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights, Dylan and Gren are unaware of the barriers erected to keep them apart. But when Gren crosses the border into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, he sets up a collision between Dana's and Willa's worlds that echoes the Beowulf story - and…
Plus, Tracey's
2, and 7-year-old's favorite books.
Why did Tracey's
7-year-old love this book?
He
loves this amazing story about a tall tree with holes in it that look like
doors and indeed they are doors that open into a different magical world in
each chapter.
He loves all the extraordinary characters he meets in the book,
including tinman and moonman. He made his own model figure of the saucepan man
as a project for school.
The first magical story in the Faraway Tree series by one of the world's most popular children's authors, Enid Blyton.
Joe, Beth and Frannie find the Enchanted Wood on the doorstep of their new home, and when they discover the Faraway Tree they fall into all sorts of adventures!
Join them and their friends Moonface, Saucepan Man and Silky the fairy as they discover which new land is at the top of the Faraway Tree. Will it be the Land of Spells, the Land of Treats, or the Land of Do-As-You-Please? Discover the magic!
I grew up in the eighties, and that means I grew up watching movies such as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Say Anything. Thirty years after watching those movies, some iconic scenes have stuck with me: the characters of The Breakfast Club sliding across the hallway to Simple Minds’ song “Don’t You Forget About Me,” John Cusack holding the boombox over his head while blaring Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” and the Psychedelic Furs “Pretty in Pink” song playing on the soundtrack of a movie by the same name. The books in this list do a lot with those same ingredients of heartbreak, music, and hope that the characters who so often remind me of myself might find love.
“In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.” That’s how Updike’s story A & P starts, and really, all I’m doing in recommending this book to you is actually recommending that you read the story A & P.
I once became an English major mostly because I was an unconfident student, and both of my parents were English teachers. I figured I could go home and get help with my homework if I needed it. I always say Updike’s A & P is the first story I ever really liked. Later, when I made the English Honor Society in college, I was asked to read a story that was important to me, and I chose this one.
I used to think all stories were old like Beowulf or MacBeth, but this one showed me stories could come from situations I’d lived. After all, I had worked in…
When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the…
Today, I teach fantasy at the University of Maryland, but I’ve been hooked on Tolkien from a young age. As a kid, I was wary that serious study of Tolkien might “destroy the magic,” but decades spent in strange corners of Tolkien’s invented universe have only deepened my appreciation for the inexhaustible depth of his sub-creation—it’s simply steeped in a profound sense of untold stories. I hope you enjoy digging in as much as I have.
I loved this book because it’s as close as we can get to a Tolkien “Guide to Fantasy.” It contains two of the best essays I’ve ever read: the cauldron of stories described in “On Fairy-stories” changed the way I understand art and tradition, and Tolkien’s defense of the Beowulf poet as a literary craftsman made me want to learn Old English and helped me understand what he was trying to build in Middle-earth.