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The week is short and full of pages but dear readers, you don’t have to read them all.  We hope we’ll both finish American Gods by Neil Gaiman before our Virtual Book Club on Friday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. CST, but will we or won’t we?!  You’ll have to sign up here and join us to find out!  We are excited to dig into this title with you very soon, and welcome all your spoilers Friday evening!

Sometimes when your reading buddy is inspired by and excited about a reading theme, you turn into Elsa and Let It Go, but also, you’re excited too, just not as excited as she is.  This is that month dear readers.  We’ve been hinting at it for weeks, and it’s almost here, but first, I want to talk a smidge about what it’s not.  Sometimes you have perfect plans and they get disrupted by life (::waves at 2020::), and other times you power through the new opportunities and note them to reconsider later.  (Yes, we’re still all about reconsiderations.)  The latter is what happened this month.  We had a really fun plan for May, including alliteration we considered for March, but decided worked better with May.  I feel like this has been in the works since at least January, but Ashley’s memory is better so hopefully she’ll correct me if that’s not right.  While we won’t be digging into Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage this month, we do encourage you to check out the resources offered by the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institutes, National Archives, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and more which can be found at asianpacificheritage.gov.  If we find a fun reading list of Asian American and Pacific Islander authors, we’ll definitely share them.  

But what is the source of Ashley’s excitement?  Mythology in May!  While we don’t anticipate this being a recurring theme like Jane in January, never say never because there are a wealth of mythologies that could inspire some fantastic books for us all!  

Before I was tortured with assigned to read The Odyssey in high school or college (yes, twice I was assigned this…text), I remember doing a unit on Greek and Roman mythology in middle school.  I was mystified with the stories and the legends, just as I was by the structures built to honor those deities that have lasted longer than their associated faiths.  While that course didn’t include a global perspective of mythology, I’ve discovered some on my own since, and Rick Riordan and Marvel have helped bring some of these larger than life characters to the page and the screen.  Riordan has a hand in one of our titles this month, and I’m told there are Norse gods joining us on the pages for Virtual Book Club this week, so it should be an interesting time for all.  We do have a couple of titles that are inspired by Greek mythology, but they are a new, feminist take, and the others are inspired by the mythology of other cultures.  

Lore by Alexandra Bracken

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia

I do want to point out one author we love who is not included – Madeline Miller.  We reviewed Circe last April and also read and loved The Song of Achilles.  Are there other titles you wanted to see on our list but didn’t?  You know my TBR needs more books, so please leave those titles in the comments!

~Nikki 

If I were required by some terrible, god-induced curse to only be able to pick one ‘genre’ to read for the rest of my days Mythology would be it. There’s war and battles, curses and magic, epic journeys and the quiet fortitude of waiting (hello, Penelope!). Additionally, there are so MANY mythological pantheons and legends (Paul Bunyan and John Henry are particularly American) and each of these mythologies keep resurfacing into present culture in a myriad of ways. Even Shakespeare brought the stories of the gods back to life as main characters in his play A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Hippolyta and Theseus – yes, that Theseus who killed the minotaur! AND the play within that play Pyramus and Thisbe! I don’t think we can be friends if 1999’s The Mummy with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz doesn’t bring you some sort of nostalgic joy. I have a specific bookshelves dedicated to mythological titles (mostly from the Classics – that’s ancient Greece and Rome) even though I have culled my owned titles to only those I truly love rather than just those I want to use as a reference book. (Here’s looking at you Edith Hamilton’s Mythology…yes also I bought a digital copy for my kindle, don’t @ me.) Plus, where does our human penchant for storytelling begin except from these legends and myths? Mythology is an amalgamation of the best and worst of what it means to be human.

Mythology, depending on the story you’re reading, the author or translation, can be dry he-said she-said or bursting with life and action. Mythology also needs to be reconsidered on a fundamental level, story by story, in order to learn the lessons we need to hear. The story of Medusa for instance? If she was a terrible monster who turned people to stone with one glance, then why was her visage used repeatedly as a symbol of protection, which has manifested itself in the modern evil eye? Yeah, yeah, OK, I know I’m really into her mythos especially since I did name my first fur-baby Medusa after her. It’s not wholly my fault, it’s my trip to Turkey’s fault, and there’s multiple pieces of photographic evidence. This digression aside, I am excited to find out the lessons we need to learn from these cultures and mythologies this month, and learn more about what makes us all human.

Nikki teased me with a Mythology themed month in December or January when we were doing big planning for this year and I, obviously, was all for it. 100%. No reservations. No reconsiderations. And I would have had a come apart if it got pushed back farther than this month let me just tell you. (Understandably, we really wanted the alliteration to happen so March or May were our options, no shame.) Because of the sheer amount of 1) pantheons and cultures and 2) modern and historical re-tellings in addition to 3) translated primary source material for every culture, we had to make some hard decisions as regards our titles this month, mostly because we can’t do what I wanted to do which was ALL THEMS. I am proud to present this collection of stories and cultures to you this month, and I hope we do justice to the sheer amount of options at our disposal for this theme in future years. ::looks away sheepishly before Nikki turns her to stone::

~Ashley

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