'Til My Face Becomes a Mirror

In the few moments before I fall asleep these days - I'm sleeping rather blissfully well these days - partly because we're all waking up before 7 a.m. It's also because I have less to worry about these days - finances are still really tricky, but I do find a great weight has lifted since the end has truly come in my relationship with ASP. Of course, I shouldn't be sleeping so much. The impingement in my neck seems to like nothing so little as sleep. The longer I sleep, the more screwed the nerves in my arm are the next day - and the longer it takes for the tingling and numbness to return to its base state - just in my forefinger and thumb and not all up my arm. Still, sleep is fun these days. So rarely in my life have I be able to regularly enjoy the sensation of drifting easily and quickly off into the land of nod. I'm also dreaming more, and the dreams are often quite entertaining. I should start to write them down.

But I digress. I was going to say, before the above paragraph got hijacked by sleep, that in the short moments before I fall asleep, I have been reading a really neat book. It's called The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason. It's a bunch of short stories - some really short - all variants of sections of the Odyssey. What if Odysseus had come home to find Penelope remarried, that sort of thing.

There's a good review of it in Slate, here.

It's pretty contemplative, and the individual chapters are all elegantly brief, and very thought provoking. The one in which Odysseus is a shaman who creates Achilles as a golem is one of my favorites, and really does connect to some very thought-provoking resonances with the myth. That's its real attraction - by looking at these well-known adventures from a slightly different angle, it reveals some of the timeless images, themes and questions of that amazing journey.

Check it out.