Reading Record 4

 Finished the book of folklore:

Around the Sun:  Stories and Symbols from Across the World by Yoshi Yoshitani

Admittedly, this was a very short book, and a full half of the pages are the author's gorgeous art.  (Which was evidently also released in an accompanying oracle deck (much like an earlier tarot deck and book of folklore by the same artist/author, both of which I have) but if the store had that deck, I didn't see it.  🤷🏻‍♀️)

Anyway, I don't have much to say, overall.  It was a fun, pleasant read, and an excellent palate cleanser after the grim side of the previous book.  The wide selection of cultures and myths was especially appealing, since there were some that I hadn't even heard of, which is exciting; so many of the same dozen or so myths tend to get included in half or more of the "world mythology" books out there, to the point that it becomes tiresome.  But this had myths that are genuinely rarely seen, like one from a pre-Incan Andean culture!  That was particularly exciting to see.

My one comment/complaint comes, unsurprisingly, from the treatment of the one myth in the book that I know really, really well:  the Trojan War.

But it's not the complaint you might expect!  The telling is mostly focused on the events of the Iliad (as you would expect) and the author carefully toed a line where Achilles and Patroclus could be interpreted as friends or lovers, and then in the follow-up page addressed how some ancient authors made them only friends and others made them lovers.  So that was all well and good...but.

But.

But....

I get that the author wanted to keep things pleasant and light. And certain topics are necessarily deeply unpleasant.

But leaving them out when they're central to the story is just sanitizing it.

Because yes, what Agamemnon took away from Achilles was a "possession."  But that "possession" was also a person.  Not mentioning that the Greeks were enslaving the Trojans they captured is not improving the story, it's just casting a blind eye to an aspect of that culture.  It's like hiding one's head in the sand to keep from seeing the ugliness of the world.  (In this case, the ugliness of the distant past, but still.  It's something that happened in Greek myths because it was something that happened in ancient Greek reality.)

😰  I wouldn't be surprised if that decision was actually made by an editor or publisher rather than the author, but it was still frustrating to encounter.  Especially since treating Briseis as if she was an inanimate object is even more dehumanizing than her situation in the original epic.

But aside from that (and a few other aspects of the Trojan War that were elided over to allow the whole tale to fit into a mere handful of pages), all good.  😁