221B Recs

Over the course of the last year, I read a bunch of stuff that was adjacent to our assigned reading for Humanities 110 book group. Some fiction, some non-fiction:

Eric Shanower, Age of Bronze
- Vol. 1: A Thousand Ships (2001)
- Vol. 2: Sacrifice (2004)
- Vol. 3, Parts 1 and 2: Betrayal (2008, 2013)

Epic graphic novel series aiming to tell the complete and coherent story of the Trojan War, weaving together sources from Homer to Shakespeare, as well as contemporary archaeological research.

( an epic project )


Michelle Ruiz Keil, Summer in the City of Roses (2021)

A very loose retelling of the Iphigenia story set in 1990s Portland. With respect to "loose retelling", I spent most of the book mildly confused as to whether this Iphigenia and Orestes were meant to be those Iphigenia and Orestes. HOWEVER. I didn't really care about that, because I absolutely adored this portrait of 1990s Portland, and particularly of the feminist counterculture scene in and around SE Division and Hawthorne. (Remember when SE Division was working class and lesbian? I do.) Yes, those were the books we were reading that year, and yes, that was when Cinemagic played nothing but The Secret of Roan Inish for, like, a year. (Was it a money laundering scheme? grrlpup and I were never sure.) Our protagonist, Iphigenia, is five-to-ten years younger than we were (she in her last year of high school, us fresh out of college), but I remember that scene vividly. I only caught one anachronism: during the 1990s that wasn't the "Portland" sign yet; it was either still the White Stag sign, or (during the closing years of the decade), the Made in Oregon sign.

As a love letter to a particular time and place and social scene, it was amazing. Re the Iphigenia retelling, the heavy slide into magical realism at the end didn't really work for me, mostly in that it seemed to take narrative agency out of the hands of the characters. And for some reason

(spoiler)

it's Orestes who gets sacrificed and turned into a deer? Because, um, feminism, I guess? Hm.

But whatever, that wasn't what I was here for. Loved the characters, loved the setting, loved their adventures, I hardly cared that it didn't stick the landing.


Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece, & Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean, 3rd ed. (1st ed 1996, 3rd ed 2014)

Veritable doorstop of a book at 700+ pages. I read the first half, at 360 pages: Egpyt and Greece, which also includes chapters about ancient Mesopotamia and the rest of the fertile crescent before we begin in on Egypt. In fact, this book almost perfectly mapped to our progress through the first year of our Hum 100 book group: every month we'd be assigned new primary sources in bookgroup, and every month I'd read the next two-to-three chapters in here to get the historical context.

Engaging and clear high-level overview of what we know about these societies, built from a combination of the literary and archaeological records. Some chapters are about the rise and fall of empires; other chapters are about the cultural goings-ons within and between those empires. There is a generous supply of maps, plus two sections of full-color plates of art. Plus lots and lots of in-text pointers to more in-depth discussions of this or that topic, should you want to dive deeper about anything. I know there's a ton of detail that didn't make it into this volume, but if you want an accessible high-level overview of these societies, their major figures, and what we know about what they did and made, this is superb. I enjoyed it immensely, and the only reason I didn't finish it is I lost my library access to it. (And also I just don't have the bandwidth to spend the next year reading about the Romans in depth on my own while simultaneously reading about Mesoamerica in book group.)

*sorrowfully removes my seven bookmarks so I can return it to the library*


John R. Hale, Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy (2009)

So, at some point along the way my Hum 110 bookgroup figured out that I was a maritime nerd (shocking, I know!), and decided that made me the in-group expert on triremes. (Spoiler: I knew jack shit about triremes.) But hey, classical Athens had a maritime empire, and its navy (and the sea battles it fought) was super-important in both Herodotus and Thucydides, and I'm game: I said I'd see what I could find out.

Lords of the Sea pulls from multiple sources to build a coherent and continuous history of the Athenian navy from Themistocles and his first advocacy for a navy (ca. 494 BCE), through Athens' defeat in the Lamian War and the death of Demosthenes (322 BCE, post-Alexander the Great). Includes diagrams and maps of the ships, the campaigns, and the battles, plus useful additional context for things that Herodotus, Thucydides, et al. did not feel a need to explain because they would have been obvious to Athenian audiences.

( maritime nerdery )


Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (2011)

Explicitly queer novelization of the Achilles-and-Patroclus story. This was wildly popular (and apparently still is -- even though it's over a decade old, at my local library there are perpetually 80-100 holds on the hardcopy and 100+ holds on the ebook).

Reader, I hated it.

( woobify those gays! )