Zach Lee

Why is this required reading?

Revisado: 05-23-20

I didn’t read this in high school, but a lot of my friends did. They mostly hated it and thought it boring.

I thought they must be wrong. How could Hercules be boring? The high drama of Olympus has only recently been matched by daytime soap operas. Surely, they were exaggerating. My class read Beowulf around that time, and many of my fellow students panned that work too. Those people were obviously idiots; a story about fighting a monster in a tavern is literally incapable of not being awesome.

Unfortunately, I am now aware of many more idiots: the teachers who require this unflinchingly boring book.

I’m almost 20 years out of high school, so I tried to ask myself if a younger me would have learned from this book.

He most certainly would not.

There were a few Greco-Roman minor myths I hadn’t heard, and those are the only reason this book didn’t get one star. I am no scholar on mythology, but I was an English major who studied Freudian symbols and read the Greek classics. I remember the Odyssey and Iliad, and Also a handful of the tragedies. But still I’d heard almost all of these stories. They’re common knowledge at this point. Maybe that means teachers have stopped requiring this book.

The one possible point of redemption was the explanation of the Norse myths, BUT SHE EVEN DID THAT WRONG. Somehow, she thought the stories of Sigmund or Siegfried or whatever his name was we’re so well known that she could paraphrase them.

I’m sorry, what?!

Outside of a very old Loony Tunes episode where Elmer Fudd thinks he kills a seductively gender fluid rabbit, I have never learned anything about the Norse gods. (I assume the MCU’s Thor is less than a true copy of his ancient predecessor, but maybe I’m wrong.)

Again, I spent several years studying English and other literature, but I still only have a passing understanding of the Norse gods. And if we’re honest, most of that came from Neil Gaiman.

Maybe in 1942, when the book was written, things were different. I know the Nazis loved Valkyrie, so maybe people then knew the whole story about what they were. A lot has changed since then.

If this book was ever worth reading, that much has changed too.

Go read American Gods and occasionally google the references. You’ll learn more about the Norse gods that way, and Homer should get you through the Greeks. That’s all you really need. The Romans copied the Greeks anyway.

And Edith Hamilton copied this from the discard pile at the Cliff’s Notes offices.

It’s appallingly bad.

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Scalia, J., mispronouncing

Revisado: 04-02-15

In a book that focuses so heavily on the law, it's extremely disappointing to hear a narrator flub the pronunciation of a Supreme Court justice's name. It's skuh-LEE-uh, not SKA-lee-uh. 😖

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Wow

Revisado: 02-22-15

This book is so good that I'm actually going to give the prequels another chance.

You just might do the same thing.

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