all the books i read in may/june and what i thought of them

 All of the books I read in May and June and what I thought of them

Ultimately I have decided to write about the books I read in May and June in the same blog post because I only read 2 books in May. I am less unhappy than I was last you heard from me, but there is still a limit to the happiness I can achieve as long as the weather is as it generally is in the summer and I am not in school. Hopefully these problems will both be resolved not this September but next September. And of course my seasonal problems are only seasonal.

I read Laughter in the Dark after I came home from school and I didn't like it very much because everyone is this book is a real loser who sucks and none of them make good choices. I was not at a time in my life to read about such a bunch of degenerate losers. Then I read The Master and Margarita. I have read this book before, and then in the intervening time I read a thinkpiece from a literary magazine about how The Master and Margarita will solve all of your problems. I can't say this is true, but it is still a great book. I liked when the poet was institutionalized for talking about the Bible with too much conviction because that almost happened to me. You can't say anything these days. I like how the master and Margarita are a couple of losers with no prospects, but they still get to throw a big party. The premise of this book is obviously great and it's such a riot but anyone could have told you that. 

I also read 4 books in June. First I read The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet because in Auctor Actor Jack Winkler mentioned it in the same sentence as Pale Fire. On this account I also read Passing Time earlier this year, and I thought both of these books were frustratingly oblique. I really don't know why I expected that either of these books would be any less oblique than Pale Fire or indeed the late great Jack Winkler himself. At this point, I have almost no memories about The Erasers except that the detective goes to an automat and eats too fast and gives himself a stomachache (real) and he keeps trying to buy erasers, but no stationery shop has an eraser that meets his criteria. Then he does something he would probably have preferred to not have done. I saw it coming only 20 pages in advance. But I guess I don't see why he couldn't have seen it 20 pages in advance, too. 

I also read Margaret Thatcher's book about Greek Sicily which I enjoyed because it amused me whenever he seemed to be pushing an agenda I already knew he has (such as panhellenism is a lie). I also started listening to the new Olivia Rodrigo album while I was reading about Mettaton or whatever. It is a great album. I can't think of a better thing to be doing after midnight while one is unemployed. I also reread The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, which is a great book in a great series, and I love Lila because I love women who are a Mary Sue. In this book Lila is not exactly a perfect person in any sense that her actions demonstrate, but everyone simps for her so much, and no one ever gets the best of her. I love when the narrative simps for a female protagonist; this also happens in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. 

Finally I read No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes. I'm going to spoil the end of Euripides's Medea and to some degree No Friend to This House as well when I talk about how it diverges from the play. Ok, I love Natalie Haynes a lot; I've been a fan of her comedy for years and I was a Stone Blind and A Thousand Ships enjoyer. I think she's really smart and cool and funny, and I MET HER at Brookline Booksmith because they were doing an author event, and I didn't want to pay to get into the theater, so I just hung out in the bookstore with Tanya until they all came across the street from the theater for the book signing in the bookstore, and she signed my Greek dictionary and told me to study hard, which I sure did. In this book she retells Argonautica AND Euripides's Medea so you get the full Jason and Medea story, beginning with the quest for the golden fleece and ending with the way the Euripides play ends, sort of (no spoilers yet) and then a little bit of an epilogue based on various mythological traditions.

I have very mixed feelings about how Natasha adapts the Euripides play; as you probably well know—although my dad didn't; I brought him to the MFA so I could take a grad picture with a Medea statue (I'm saluting her) and then mentioned offhand that she kills her children, and I thought he was kidding when he said, what?—in the Euripides play, Medea kills her children because she is so angry with Jason for leaving her that she will do anything to hurt him even if it hurts her more. In the Natalie Haynes adaptation, she kills her children because a couple of armed guys are going to kill them otherwise. This is obviously completely different!! In the novel you do not get the scheming or the agonizing as occurs in the play but those are the best parts!! 

I accept that there are various versions of the Medea story and I think I've also been told that Euripides might well have originated the plot point where Medea kills her kids. But of course this is still the most well-known version of the myth in our time and it is her ancient source material. I respect in an abstract sense that a modern author can take creative liberties (I will be appreciating the Odyssey movie if it kills me), but the creative liberties have to be interesting, and I feel in this instance that the author is just changing the story to make Medea more palatable to a modern milquetoast quasi-feminist approach. Play Medea is very complex and difficult, and I find her very interesting, but I think the author just does not want to write about a woman who kills her children totally of her own volition to get back at her husband because she doesn't think this character would be acceptable to modern sensibilities. 

I'm particularly surprised she makes this choice because she says in the author's note that she wrote her undergraduate thesis about heroic infanticide in Medea WHICH I DID TOO. She of course knows that play Medea is really, really not acceptable to ancient sensibilities, either. I have written about this and they gave me the highest poli sci honors for it, Medea is a female tragic hero in the tradition of Ajax and Achilles (Achilles is an epic hero obviously) who doesn't have to conform to ordinary morality because she transcends it. It is not her job to be palatable, it is her job to be better than everyone else. She is a fictional character who is allowed to be antisocial because the tragic/epic hero is a person with a great spirit who transgresses the boundaries everyone else has to deal with in order to live. You will notice that she can't stand being insulted or laughed at. Her reputation means everything to her; she cannot be seen as a failure or a person you can get away with insulting, and you see this with male heroes, too.

Play Medea really spoke to me when I first read it because I was furious with an erstwhile high school friend who had wronged me, and it seemed to me that the play was pointing out the destructive consequences of all-encompassing outrage and indignation. But ultimately the book that made me get over it was Knife by Salman Rushdie. When I reread it in Greek, I was furious again—mind you I still am—with different people for similar reasons, and I found it sort of cathartic to read about a character who destroys herself (and her children) to get revenge even if I can't do that. Medea is a reflection of my unconstrained soul. Notwithstanding the fact that if I were a real epic hero I would smash things, it is such a cool thing to reframe my anger and indignation as something I experience because I'm a modern female epic hero responding to an insult instead of this awful feeling that eats away at me. The solution to spite is megalomania; that's my opinion, anyway.

I also think it is really cool for Medea to act like a tragic hero because she is assimilating a traditionally masculine archetype; the only really original thing (as far as I know) I said in my Medea thesis chapter is that, as a male epic hero transgresses the boundaries of social rules, a female epic hero (tragic hero) transgresses specifically the boundaries that apply to women. I give you my Medea conclusion: 

"I would argue that Medea’s role as a female tragic hero makes her an exceptional woman who can speak in defense of all Athenian women (I am tentatively agreeing with Vellacott’s argument along similar lines in Ironic Drama). Medea laments that women can’t choose who they are married to, and that “if they are not [married to a good husband], one must die” (εἰ δὲ μή, θανεῖν χρεών 243). But this doesn’t apply to Medea; “she herself, being a woman in ten thousand, had in fact chosen her own mate” (Vellacott 1975, 109). Her proto-feminist speech “is spoken less on her own behalf of all of the women of Athens” (ibid). An ordinary Athenian woman probably does not have any occasion to publicly make feminist speeches, but Medea can defend women and respond to male chauvinism as aggressively as she wants without, as it turns out, facing any consequences...Because Medea is unlike the other women, she is the only one who can assert her autonomy, and she is the only one who can make a defense of women’s liberation on behalf of the women who are silenced. In this way, Euripides makes Medea into an archetype who ignores oppressive boundaries in order to illustrate the boundaries that keep Athenian women down."  

But novel Medea is not a female tragic hero. Novel Medea is almost a modern woman in ancient times. I think it is fine if Natalie Haynes wants to tell a different story than Euripides, but her version of the story is just not as interesting and seems to support a very boring and uninspired feminist agenda (woman good man bad). 

To be honest I just have no idea why she thought this was a better narrative choice; a Goodreads reviewer suggests that Natalie Haynes, as many other myth retellers, doesn't really care for the OG poets and feels they were unfair to women, but EURIPIDES is a proto-feminist (see also: my senior thesis) and anyway it's so obvious in her BBC series that she is such a fan of the OG poets?? What I do like is how the author makes it really obvious that the gods support Medea; the gods are quite absent in the Euripides play until she suddenly acquires a flying chariot from Helios (who clearly supports her, but he is her grandfather). In the novel Hera is also a Medea supporter. I think that's great.

Also, I am only criticizing the Euripides adaptation. I haven't read all of Argonautica (I have never read book 4 in any language, so I have no idea how it ends, and I'm still not exactly sure where in No Friend to This House is the end of the Argonautica segment), but I've read the first two books in English and spent a lot of time agonizing over book 3 in Greek for two classes even though I wasn't technically in either of them (and on two separate occasions I have mistakenly translated the beginning of the first book because I didn't realize we were starting at the beginning of the third book). It's very cool that this book brings Argonautica to a broader audience since it's sort of niche and I support all good press for Apollonius of Rhodes. I was so chuffed any time I saw something that was basically a direct translation. I finally feel like all of my effort was for something. The Argonautica is on a certain level very beautiful, but I find it incredibly difficult (especially because of the obscure vocabulary) and it's very challenging for me to appreciate it. But for the first time ever I... love the Argonautica?? This is obviously a blasphemous thing to say as an amateur philologist, and if the real classicists send a hit man after me, it would be only fair.

Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov ⭐⭐⭐

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (reread) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet ⭐⭐⭐

Book about Greek Sicily by Margaret Thatcher ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (reread) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes ⭐⭐⭐⭐

As you see my wind ensemble sure had a point when they gave me the paper plate award "most likely to tear a book to shreds [on the internet] and then give it four stars" (it's all thanks to my lovely friend Julia flute).