The Myths: A Short History of Myth / The Penelopiad / Weight

by Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson

Shelf wear to slipcase, some marking to dust jackets . Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

Genres: Fiction, Mythology, Fantasy, Religion, Short Stories, Classics

Hardcover Boxset

First published October 21, 2005

About the author

Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator of Irish Catholic descent known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and graduated in English. She left the convent in 1969. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.
Armstrong received the US$100,000 TED Prize in February 2008. She used that occasion to call for the creation of a Charter for Compassion, which was unveiled the following year.

Reviews

[Elsje · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ik kocht onlangs een cassette met daarin drie deeltjes van de Canongate myths-serie. Het eerste deeltje daarin is een inleiding op de serie, waarin Karen Armstrong een min of meer wetenschappelijke verhandeling houdt over de geschiedenis, de ontwikkeling en de functie van mythes. Mythes daterend uit de prehistorie tot recente mythes. Mythes die dienen om de onbegrijpbare wereld begrijpelijk te maken, om contact tussen het goddelijke en het alledaagse te leggen, om de overgang van kind naar volwassene te begeleiden.
Het was wel even werken voor Elsje! Ik hoop dat het me zal helpen om de rest van de serie een beetje in perspectief te plaatsen, dan is het werken in ieder geval niet voor niets geweest :-)

[Tori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip Pullman's "A word or two about myths" evidenced his usual love for storytelling. And a nice little anti-formalist/anti-structuralist stab at those who would simplify all stories into basic types. Dream Angus was my favorite. The Weight was good and Atwood's Penelope story a disappointment. Armstrong had a Pullman-esque reverence for imagination but was less tolerable in her longwinded expression of it.

[Phyllis]

have not heard about this one

[Matthew Lloyd]

Review of The Penelopiad on re-reading.

[VG · Rating 3 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed ‘Weight’, which modernises the interaction between Heracles and Atlas whilst simultaneously drawing parallels with a metaphorical carrying of the world’s ‘weight’. ‘A Short History of Myth’ also serves as a good primer to the subject, although having read reasonably extensively on the topic before, there was not much new there. The disappointment was ‘The Penelopiad’; despite claiming to be centred around Penelope and the maids, she read simply as a conduit for Odysseus with the odd self-reflective moment. With so many exceptional female-centred retellings released over the past few years, it now pales in comparison.

[Sarah Formica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn’t find anything on Goodreads to rate just Weight so this was the best I could do.