Our dining room table is covered with boxes of books for sale. I have them listed on FB Marketplace. Sales have been good, though slower of late. All the better-known books have been bought. The ones left are more obscure, or are common and people already have them. The boxes include a number of books I’d like to read, but don’t see any way to get to them in the years I have left, so out they go. I’ve already started moving the $1 books out to the garage, to a donation pile.
One of those books I wanted to read I decided to read while it wasn’t selling. It’s The Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch. Here’s how the Wikipedia entry on it starts:
Bulfinch’s Mythology is a collection of tales from myth and legend rewritten for a general readership by the American Latinist and banker Thomas Bulfinch, published after his death in 1867. The work was a successful popularization of Greek mythology for English-speaking readers.
I know very little about Greek mythology. We covered The Iliad and The Odessey in school, and Oedipus Rex, but I’m afraid I learned little and retained less. As an adult, I’ve read a little of Lucretius and Virgle but found both incomprehensible in the English translations available to me.
But back to Bulfinch. I enjoyed the book but am somewhat afraid I wasted my time on it. I mean, who care about these mythical god named Jupiter and Juno, and about the humans they interacted with? Who cares that they had conflicts that make our world seem dull, or that they changed form to bulls, rabbits, birds, or fish to get out of jams? People keep dying and are brought back to life by some god who takes pity on them. The stories are ridiculous. Nothing in this book makes me want to pick up one of those ancient books and read it in translation. The ones I have left (a few have sold) will remain on the dining room table in hopes that someone will buy them before they go to Goodwill or wherever.
Here’s more from Wikipedia:
The book is a prose recounting of myths and stories from three eras: Greek and Roman mythology, King Arthur legends and medieval romances. Bulfinch intersperses the stories with his own commentary, and with quotations from writings by his contemporaries that refer to the story under discussion. This combination of classical elements and modern literature was novel for his time.
Much of the book was about how poets of a more recent age, such as Milton, Pope, Keats, Shelly, Tennyson, made reference to these ancient myths. I skipped over those lines of poetry, making my read faster. I’d say Milton was probably mentioned most, which may explain why I’ve had so much trouble reading, and have never finished, his Paradise Lost.
I give the book 3-stars, and cannot recommend you read it. Part of the problem is the number of character names to wade through. The first chapter alone was enough to get my head spinning. The 3-star rating is because it’s a well written book. It just turned out that the subject matter was borderline uninteresting and, as I said before, ridiculous. I’m glad I grew up after the era where knowing this stuff was considered a “classical” education.
