THIS PATTERN SHOWS UP A LOT. My English II class taught me that authors use repetition of themes to tell you that they're important, so, that means this pattern must be REAL important:

1. Jupiter inexplicably rapes the Fair Maiden.
2. Juno uses trickery (trickery!) to cause the Fair Maiden to unwillingly screw everything up.
3. The Fair Maiden cries so much, she makes this river!
4. The Fair Maiden inexplicably turns into a tree. Usually some sort of soliloquoy about the unfairness of the situation occurs before the mouth gets all bark'd over. Some new flower may or may not grow around them.
5. Some men/warriors inexplicably get turned into birds as they run away from whatever. Some of them actually look pretty cool if you look them up online.



(Way to go, Tereus. Apparently raping your wife's sister and cutting her tongue out afterwards gets you turned into the coolest looking bird ever. I'll take note.)

6. The narrative shifts, and is transitioned laughably obviously at times. New plotlines can be introduced with something along the lines of "Meanwhile, some guy in some other city over here was too busy to care about what was going on in that city over there that you just read about, because for him, all this unrelated stuff was going on..." It's kind of funny catching this when it happens, but it could be the translator's inelegantness, too. Occasionally, a story will end with a QUOTATION MARK, which made me usually think "Oh, this was a story some guy was telling? In-universe? The whole time? Huh."

Now, I could bring up the fact that I have little to no mythological background, (view spoiler)[Let alone with Greek names- no one, I repeat, NO ONE ever knows the Latin names, beyond recognizing them as planet names. I could never tell anyone about the stories in this book without explaining each god in depth, and waiting for the description to click and have them recall the Greek name. "Oh, you mean Hera!" "Yeah, sure." (hide spoiler)] experience reading epics (I think this is my first), age (yeah, yeah), or some combination as a result for WHY this book was so hard for me, but I instead will blame the translation!

This was a somewhat impulse buy at a Barnes & Noble (They had their annual buy-two-get-one-free sale on their "Classics" series. Who could say no?). I really liked the painting on the cover (it's all because of that one nipple, I tell you– hot stuff), and the cryptic poeticness of the name and the single-word author name. The back cover promised that the book is a great starting point for ol' Greco-Roman religion and mythology (it is), and that it's a breezy, beautiful prose translation (it isn't). It doesn't have the same bouncy elegence and rhythm of the poem, but it's still hard to read and very choppy– basically, a lose-lose. I heavily utilized the SparkNotes, and am not proud. If I ever reread this, I'll buy a verse translation– beautiful cover be damned. I swear Barnes & Noble Classics are just harder to read, too. "Oh, you're just saying that because all Barnes & Noble Classics books are just that– Classics, and you have trouble with them!" NOT SO! Everything about their layout– typeface, padding, etc.– is all wrong, wrong, wrong. Many people say those little nuances don't matter to that far of an extent, BUT I WANT EVIDENCE.

The introduction, afterword, endnotes, and footnotes are great, as always with B&N. (view spoiler)[With one exception: in the middle of the story about Erysichthon, there is a footnote about how it inspired Stephen King's Thinner. Not a brief mention in the very informative "Works Inspired by Ovid" essay in the afterword, no, a footnote on the very page it's on. Very strange. (hide spoiler)] The maps are unreadable, but a nice touch. The endnotes would elaborate on some of the backgrounds Ovid would dance around or assume we already knew. The endnote about Daedelus building a wooden cow for Pasiphaë to reside in so she could woo her star-crossed lover made me laugh more than I knew two-millenia-old books could make me. If only Ovid included it in the narrative...

One disappointment I had was– and this sounds kind of pathetic– that I was expecting hypermasculine, brainless adventure I could escape to. The Metamorphoses turned out being just the opposite– intelligent, philosophical, largely cynical, and pacifist. Oh well. I guess that's what Beowulf is for?

This was a grueling read, even when I read it in five chapter chunks between normal novels. It was completely worth it. Just know what you're in for.

To make it even more worthwhile, REMEMBER THE NAMES OF EVERY PERSON AND WHAT THEY DID. REMEMBER THE GREEK EQUIVALENTS OF ALL THE GODS, TOO. This way you can sound like the coolest kid in the whole AP English IV class. Sample use:

Student: "Shakespeare and the Bible were the only original things in the world, everything else just ripped them off, yeah."

OPTIMAL RESPONSE: "Actually, many of Shakespeare's plays are inspired, if not directly pulled, out of stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses, one of Shakespeare's favorite works of literature. Even the infamous Romeo & Juliet is a very close parallel to Ovid's telling of Pyramus and Thisbe, two star-crossed lovers who kill themselves out of a tragic misunderstanding."

RESPONSE THAT I'D WIND UP GIVING: "No, no, in the uh Metamorphoses, there was this one guy and this one girl that were, that were, I don't remember their names, but they were pretty much Romeo & Juliet, even sneaking away from their families to be together and the both wound up dead over some misunderestimation of, uh, some bloody clothes, the guy thought the other was eated by a lioness, a female lion, if you didn't know. Ah hah. Ah hah. Huh. If you read it you'd know what I'd mean, you should all read it, it was good, it was, it, I'll, I'll stop now." "Thank you Josh."

It might be a good idea to learn the proper pronunciation of both "Metamorphoses" and "Ovid," too. Does that sneaky "e" change the pronunciation or accentation at all? Is it "oh-vid" or "ah-vid", anyway? Good things to know.

To everyone who asked: I AM NOT READING THIS FOR SCHOOL. I want to cry whenever I get asked this. That's easily one of the worst parts of reading "serious" literature in high school. For now, I can hide behind the relative obscurity of names like Pynchon and Gaddis and the likes for when I'm feeling like a good masochistic tome, but there's no way I'm reading Milton, Dante, Chaucer, Homer, or any Victorian novel until I'm sporting some variety of facial hair and a high school diploma. But I guess then, I'll have to deal with people telling me they had to read "dat crap" for school. You can never win.

Book IX was my favorite.