![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
false_mariaSo I haven't really read any YA lit of any sort since the 7th Harry Potter book. (I do definitely mean to try the Hunger Games some time.)
But I picked up the Percy Jackson series for shits and giggles this week, and I have to say, I enjoyed it. Now, I don't know how much a kid would enjoy it who was coming to the myths for the very first time, and wouldn't, say, recognize what was pretty much exactly a genderswapped Achilles-and-Patroclus story in the 5th book for the awesome genderswapped story of Achilles and Patroclus that it was. (That was hands down my favorite single thing in the whole series, by the way. God, I loved Clarisse. She got to do the whole arrogant-Achilles sulking in the tents over her wounded honor until the last desperate moment and everything. :D)
But I grew up reading and reading and reading and rereading the real Greek myths, probably more than any other single book I owned as a kid**. So it was fun to play spot-the-reference and guess-the-mythological-character. And enjoy fun little bits like the kids meeting Hephaestus at his forge, which in the modern age looks more like a mechanic's garage, with giant automaton creatures and chariots up on the lifts alongside an old Toyota. :D (And so Hephaestus in the Percy Jackson universe is a sort of divine Tom or Ray Magliozzi.) I guess I dunno how it'd be to read the Percy Jackson books as your very first intro to Greek myth. It would be a different experience. And Percy himself was not as sympathetic a hero as Harry Potter--he was more like a shonen manga protagonist in a lot of ways. And while his friends and companions and a lot of the various side characters were cool, none of his friendships were given nearly the sustained development that the Harry-Hermione-Ron trio got in HP. The closest thing was his relationship with Annabeth, and that was always clearly going to be romantic.
**This book was a kind of mash-up of selected excerpts of Ovid and Homer and Hesiod, strung together with some added embellishment and minus any of the queer parts, I should note, which I discovered when I finally read the Metamorphoses in 10th grade. And it was called "Greek Mythology for Everyone". Still, by 'everyone' it definitely didn't mean 'children' (which my parents, who gave it to me without reading it first themselves, did not know :D:). And so this book included plenty of the dirty scary sexual Freudian parts of the myths (like I say. I read it over and over and over again), like a very graphic description of the castration of Ouranos and the birth of Aphrodite. This meant that when in 5th grade we all read the big colorful D'Aulaire book of Greek myths for children in which Ouranos is "hurt very badly and runs away" and Aphrodite then, in totally unrelated news, rises up from an unexplained froth of mysterious foam on the sea, my little hand went right up and I very much wanted to explain the rest of the story to the class. I was not allowed to. :D
Even Bulfinch's mythology would surely have told the whole story of Aphrodite, though when I also picked that book up in high school, I particularly remember Bulfinch's insistence that Zeus had no ulterior motives whatever when he abducted Ganymede; the king of the gods just wanted an attractive young man to hold his cup and no that's not a euphemism for anything thank you very much. (At the time I first read this, I didn't think to doubt him--hey, I was a sheltered kid, and I'd only recently even learned (from Ovid, as I say) that Orpheus swung both ways. Orpheus in my 10th grade English class was what Aphrodite and Ouranos were in my 5th grade reading class. :D Of course, this time my 10th grade teacher didn't hush me up, she just had no idea what I was talking about.)
Which all reminds me, there was some...what was it, Nathaniel Hawthorne or someone, who did a version of Hades and Persephone in which Persephone's just a little girl and Hades is a gruff old guy whom by the end of the story she gladly promises to visit every year so that he won't be sad? (Yes, it was Hawthorne--here's that story...and now that I look back at it, I can't help but think it reads a little like some awful moe version of Hades and Persephone. Crap.)
But I picked up the Percy Jackson series for shits and giggles this week, and I have to say, I enjoyed it. Now, I don't know how much a kid would enjoy it who was coming to the myths for the very first time, and wouldn't, say, recognize what was pretty much exactly a genderswapped Achilles-and-Patroclus story in the 5th book for the awesome genderswapped story of Achilles and Patroclus that it was. (That was hands down my favorite single thing in the whole series, by the way. God, I loved Clarisse. She got to do the whole arrogant-Achilles sulking in the tents over her wounded honor until the last desperate moment and everything. :D)
But I grew up reading and reading and reading and rereading the real Greek myths, probably more than any other single book I owned as a kid**. So it was fun to play spot-the-reference and guess-the-mythological-character. And enjoy fun little bits like the kids meeting Hephaestus at his forge, which in the modern age looks more like a mechanic's garage, with giant automaton creatures and chariots up on the lifts alongside an old Toyota. :D (And so Hephaestus in the Percy Jackson universe is a sort of divine Tom or Ray Magliozzi.) I guess I dunno how it'd be to read the Percy Jackson books as your very first intro to Greek myth. It would be a different experience. And Percy himself was not as sympathetic a hero as Harry Potter--he was more like a shonen manga protagonist in a lot of ways. And while his friends and companions and a lot of the various side characters were cool, none of his friendships were given nearly the sustained development that the Harry-Hermione-Ron trio got in HP. The closest thing was his relationship with Annabeth, and that was always clearly going to be romantic.
**This book was a kind of mash-up of selected excerpts of Ovid and Homer and Hesiod, strung together with some added embellishment and minus any of the queer parts, I should note, which I discovered when I finally read the Metamorphoses in 10th grade. And it was called "Greek Mythology for Everyone". Still, by 'everyone' it definitely didn't mean 'children' (which my parents, who gave it to me without reading it first themselves, did not know :D:). And so this book included plenty of the dirty scary sexual Freudian parts of the myths (like I say. I read it over and over and over again), like a very graphic description of the castration of Ouranos and the birth of Aphrodite. This meant that when in 5th grade we all read the big colorful D'Aulaire book of Greek myths for children in which Ouranos is "hurt very badly and runs away" and Aphrodite then, in totally unrelated news, rises up from an unexplained froth of mysterious foam on the sea, my little hand went right up and I very much wanted to explain the rest of the story to the class. I was not allowed to. :D
Even Bulfinch's mythology would surely have told the whole story of Aphrodite, though when I also picked that book up in high school, I particularly remember Bulfinch's insistence that Zeus had no ulterior motives whatever when he abducted Ganymede; the king of the gods just wanted an attractive young man to hold his cup and no that's not a euphemism for anything thank you very much. (At the time I first read this, I didn't think to doubt him--hey, I was a sheltered kid, and I'd only recently even learned (from Ovid, as I say) that Orpheus swung both ways. Orpheus in my 10th grade English class was what Aphrodite and Ouranos were in my 5th grade reading class. :D Of course, this time my 10th grade teacher didn't hush me up, she just had no idea what I was talking about.)
Which all reminds me, there was some...what was it, Nathaniel Hawthorne or someone, who did a version of Hades and Persephone in which Persephone's just a little girl and Hades is a gruff old guy whom by the end of the story she gladly promises to visit every year so that he won't be sad? (Yes, it was Hawthorne--here's that story...and now that I look back at it, I can't help but think it reads a little like some awful moe version of Hades and Persephone. Crap.)