Post
by miniver » Fri Aug 30, 2013 8:20 pm
I know what you mean, Ajnos. I live in the Northern Hemisphere, but not in Britain, so the thrill of being there and reading books set there was a new one for me when I went to grad school. It's so wonderful walking around where some legendary character such as Arthur might have spent time.
I've been rereading Agatha Christie's short stories. She's one of those rare authors whose short stories are just about as well fleshed out as her novels. (Of course Arthur Conan Doyle is another.) One interesting collection of connected tales that you might find interesting, Ajjie is The Labors of Hercules. (Labours to you!) In these twelve stories, her detective Poirot, whose first name is Hercule, takes on twelve cases that are cleverly connected to the twelve tasks of Hercules. For example, the story about the Augean stables concerns a political scandal, with the implication being that politics can be as grimy as the stables that only Hercules could clean. (He cleaned them, I believe, by diverting a river from its course so that it flowed right through the stables.) The Poirot stories are fun to read on their own, being excellent puzzlers, but they're even more impressive with the classical connections.
Caution: those TLC members who are younger, check with your parents to see if these books are okay for you. Though they were written in more innocent times, they still were written for adults, so they might have some themes that people would not want to encounter before, say, later high school years. But that's true of the Stephen Lawhead books and others, so I feel comfortable bringing them up here.
Someone just gave me a new modern translation of an old Arthurian story known as the Alliterative Morte Arthure. This is not related to the far better known Thomas Malory Morte d'Arthur. This twelfth-century work, anonymous I think, is one I read years ago for my college honors thesis on Sir Gawain. It's a marvelous story, and I'm eager to read it again. I read it (with much labor!) in the original Early Middle English when I studied it in college, but this time I'll be reading the revved-up version that should speed me through.