My brilliantly aptly distractingly named new series continues. Where I randomly select two books from my shelves and attempt to find a link. I do not promise it will be a good link, only that it will be a link. It might be anything at all. One thing I do promise is that the link will not be due to the books both containing words such as ‘and’ or ‘the’, although having said that it’d be really awesome to now find two books totally missing both of those words.
The books I chose last week were Medea and Other Plays by Euripides and The Company of Words by Deborah Miller. Stay tuned to find out if I’ve actually got a link.
The Books
Medea and Other Plays by Euripides is one of those classics. It’s a series of plays originally played in Greek amphitheatres. Euripides was slightly out of the norm for his day as he used strong female characters, but they were played by men.
The Company of Words by Deborah Miller is a book I’ve not read. I was on a conference with Miller many years ago. I found her lovely and thoughtful which comes out in everything I read about both her and this book. This text has responses to the Torah, each story is a response to a different portion of the Torah.
The Link
The link today is rather gruesome. Many themes in the Torah are bloodthirsty, they talk about slaughtering people, they also talk about counting people but let’s ignore that today. Miller’s book has many of the bloodthirsty themes. Medea is rather bloodthirsty, instead of letting her husband marry someone else she kills her, and she kills her kids. Essentially she kills all the innocents.
Next Week!
Next week we have some interesting books. The Stars Like Dust by Isaac Asimov and Only Human by Tom Holt. I am now one more week closer to have done this series for a year. I’m very tempted to give up at week 52 and find something else to write about. Sometimes links just hit me in the brain cells, other times I’m drawing them out of absolutely nothing.