Reading

Neil Gaiman's Sandman and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King in my spare moments at home, and loving both of them. I never had the chance to follow Sandman when it first became a cult classic, but upon learning that Widener had a complete backlog of the comic in bound graphic novel format, I just couldn't resist. The first volume involved a lot of becoming and less of an overall plot arc as the title character was re-introduced and recast as something different than his former self as part of the D.C. Comics "Multiverse". In fact the first seven issues of the eight-part volume do touch briefly upon somewhat familiar heroes and villains, but by issue number eight Sandman has broken free of its former moorings and found a voice of its own. And what a voice! After freeing himself from a power-hungry mage who imprisoned him for eighty years and stole the tools of his trade, the Sandman (a.k.a. Dream) finds himself wandering adrift, wondering what to do next. In the eighth issue the bummed-out personification tags along with his spunky little sister, Death, while she makes her rounds, and by the end of the day has rediscovered his purpose in the grand scheme of things and the will to go on. Only in the dark imagination of Neil Gaiman! I'm already looking forward to the second volume.

As for The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I'm beginning to worry that I've overlooked poor Stephen King for all of these years for no good reason whatsoever. First his On Writing gives me the much-needed kick in the creative posterior to start putting my ideas down on paper at long last, and now I can't put down this excellent little novel about a girl who gets lost in the Maine woods. His depiction of the psychological state of someone who loses her bearings in the wilderness and panics is dead-on, and although there is no supernatural element to this story, the lurking horror of a child alone in a Nature that is indifferent to her at best and hostile at worst is omnipresent in its awful real-world potential.

And finally, two new acquisitions to the bookshelf at home - Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation, which the good folks at Widener ILL so effortlessly fetched for me; and Homeric Questions by Gregory Nagy, the Harvard professor of the Classics who towers over the field of epic poetry like a Titan (some would say too much so). Nevertheless, his book is one that I've been curious to read, especially now that I am spending more and more time with Homer in the course of my teaching. It's remarkable actually how little time the average Greek student spends on the Iliad and Odyssey nowadays, when to the Ancient Greeks themselves and the Byzantines who succeeded them Homer was Greek, and the study of Greek often began and ended with the study of Homer. Too quickly now we Classicists plow through the readings courses and the required purple passages in order to make a beeline to our pet authors and our future thesis topics, when to be perfectly honest a line-by-line reading of Homer's two epics would put us in much more excellent stead as future Hellenists than so many (albeit beautiful) bits and pieces of poetry and prose. To know Homer intimately is to know the Greek mind as well. Everything else proceeds from that knowledge, or so I'm learning!