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| January reads |
January wrap-up
- Finished: 5
- Started but not finished: 3
- Total pages read: 1,995
- Average rating: 4.5
- Books bought: 2
This was a great start to the year! Closer to two thousand pages read is always a great month, and I also finished a lot of books (which means that they were shorter reads, but anyway). Three books I will continue reading next month, so I won’t say more about them at the moment.
Two of the books I finished were modern fiction, Claire North’s Ithaca (4/5 stars) and Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters (3.5/5 stars). Click the links to read more on what I thought about those books. The other three were part of my ancient texts project (more on that below). When it comes to ratings, I wish I could have given my modern reads higher ratings, but at least the rest of the books I could give five stars to. Speaking of my other reads…
Ancient texts project
One of my
hobbies is collecting ancient Greek and Latin works, mostly as translations.
That means that I sometimes end up with multiple translations of the same work.
I’ve read at least one translation of each text, but this year my goal is to
read all the duplicate translations. In January, I read Aeschylus’s Agamemnon,
and two translations of Oedipus Rex and one of Antigone by
Sophocles. Here are mini reviews of the tragedies.
Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is the first tragedy in his Oresteia trilogy. It narrates Agamemnon’s return from Troy with Cassandra and their murder by his wife Clytemnestra. This morally complex play features weak men and a strong and vengeful female lead. It made a nice pair to Claire North’s Ithaca, where Clytemnestra also makes an appearance.
Oedipus’ story is probably well-known to everyone: he has unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. In the tragedy, he finds out the truth. The themes of seeing and blindness are prevalent as Oedipus scrabbles to uncover the truth. The older of these translations tries to replicate the Greek meter and is closer to the ancient Greek text. The newer is a more modern translation that leaves out lot of the mythological names not familiar to modern readers. It’s not translated from ancient Greek, but what makes it fascinating is that it was translated by the actors themselves, and thus the text is almost word for word what they would have said on stage.
Antigone continues the story of Oedipus’ family and narrates what happens after Oedipus’ death. Antigone is Oedipus’ daughter. His sons, her brothers, kill each other in a battle, and Antigone defies the tyrant’s order not to bury her brother. The conflict between the tyrant’s hubris and the divine order to bury the dead leads to several tragic deaths.
I also started Plato’s Republic, but more on that in my February wrap-up.
February hopefuls
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| February hopefuls |
I plan to finish two modern fiction novels, Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library. Lessons in Chemistry I started in January, and so far I’m enjoying it.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace I started in early January, and I hope to finish it in March, so it’s on my “to continue” pile.
The rest of the books are for my ancient texts project. I plan to finish Plato’s Republic, Sophocles’s Antigone (a different translation than the one I read last month), Aristotle’s Poetics, two of Cicero’s works (On Old Age and On Friendship), and Epictetus’s Handbook. Two other books I’ll start and finish in March: Sophocles’s The Complete Plays and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
All of the books from the ancient texts project are technically rereads, I just haven’t read these translations yet. Sophocles’s The Complete Plays is in English, the rest are Finnish translations.
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You can hear more about my thoughts on my January reads and about my plans for February from my monthly Youtube reading wrap-up video.
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