Skip to main content

Wednesday reading experience #27

I forgot to post the Wednesday reading challenge on Wednesday, so here it is now:

If you come from a Western or Christian culture, read the Bible and consider how it has affected the literary heritage of your culture or country. If you belong to a non-Christian religion or culture, do the same with the primary book of your religion.

It is not necessary to be religious or even to be a believer to enjoy doing this, just to enjoy reading and thinking about literature and literary connections.

There are many, many different stories in the Bible, and most, if not all, have been reworked, twisted, inverted, used as inspiration, referred or alluded to in some form of literature.

Here is a list of some literature to check out that use biblical material or biblical themes:

Connie Willis: “Inn” and “Epiphany”, both in Miracle and other Christmas Stories
Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman: Good Omens
David Seltzer: The Omen
John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy
C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Latters
John Milton “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained”
Mark Twain: Letters from the Earth
O. Henry: “The Gift of the Magi”

I had a longer list, but now I can't find it. I'll post more when I do.
Labels:

Comments

Geetali said…
That's an interesting & thought-provoking post, Bib. In India, tonnes of literature has been inspired by our epics. Of the two great ones - Ramayan & Mahabharat - the latter finds more takers. This is so because the former is a straightforward tale of valour, honour & decency in public life. The Mahabharat, otoh, is a marvellous story full of men & women who're heroes & diabolical characters at the same time! It's a superb story with lots of twists & turns and every possible human folly you can think of!
My favourite books inspired by it are: 1) Yugaant by Irawati Karve (a feminist take on the epic)- Marathi; 2) Rashmi Rathi, an epyllion by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar - Hindi; 3) Mrityunjay, by Shivaji Sawant - Marathi.
July 15, 2009 11:04 am
Bibliophile said…
Some day I will go an read the full texts of both the Ramayan and the Mahabharat. I've read retellings and stories (or maybe I should call them episodes) from both and enjoyed it very much. There is so much material there than can be used to good effect in literature. I wonder if the books you mention have been translated into English?
July 15, 2009 11:41 am
Geetali said…
I don't think, Bibliophile, that these books were translated into English. Found this on Google:
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=uJz4ZWsRcsAC&dq=Yuganta&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=gC9jSs_5FtaBkQXIs5X1Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4
July 19, 2009 2:37 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more