Some Say It’s True, and Some Say It’s a Fable (original) (raw)

Breverton’s Phantasmagoria: A Compendium of Monsters, Myths and Legends, by Terry Breverton – This is a collection of myths and legends, some ancient and others pretty recent. They include people, places, artifacts, and both mythical animals and weird beliefs about real animals. There’s a lot of interesting stuff, but it’s not organized very well and the entries tend to be quite brief Most of the legends are just recorded at face value, even when they’ve been pretty well debunked. It’s good for a starting point, and it has a lot of cool pictures. And, as I’ve seen mentioned in other reviews, he references Pliny the Elder constantly.

In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales, by Lord Dunsany – This is a rather eclectic collection of short stories, ranging from heroic fantasy to more realistic fare, but there’s definitely a dreamlike quality to most of them. And a lot of them really are quite short, sometimes only a single page. The tale referenced in the title is part of his Gods of Pegana series, about the mythology of an invented world. It has a king and his army go to war against the personification of Time, only for them all to age incredibly quickly upon getting close to him. A few other stories are about the author venturing into an alternate world accessed through a remote shop, and at one point coming back to the wrong place. Others are about a businessman buying a magical window that looks out onto a medieval city, Poseidon lamenting his lack of sacrifices in the modern age, a dog making financial deals, and a club staffed by former kings. The Jorkens tales have a sportsman regaling others with outlandish yarns of his travels, and someone else tries to outdo him with a story about flying in an airplane to Mars and finding out that it has a human population. I’d say it’s worth the time.

Spider-Man: Life Story, by Chip Zdarsky and Mark Bagley – I used to check out comics from the library pretty often, but I hadn’t in a while, so I thought I’d take a look at the shelf when I went there to pick up a book. Published in 2019, it tells Peter Parker’s history throughout the decades in a darker way that addresses the events from these time periods. I know Flash Thompson enlisted to fight in Vietnam during the comic’s original run, but there’s much more focus on the war here. There seems to be some heavy Watchmen influence in how American history is affected by the well-known existence of superheroes. It also has a lot about Tony Stark being a jerk. And Peter ages normally throughout, being in his seventies in the last story.

She-Hulk, Volume 1: Jen, Again, by Rainbow Rowell, Roge Antonio, and Luca Maresca – Another comic volume I checked out from the library, which collects a few issues, but isn’t really a complete story in and of itself. It’s mostly about Jennifer Walters getting back to a relatively normal life. She doesn’t break the fourth wall here, but she’s a likeable and entertaining character, and there’s a lot of pin-up style art of her here.

A lot of it has her bonding with Jack of Hearts, a character I don’t think I’ve encountered before.

The Complete Fables, by Aesop – What I read is apparently not actually complete, as it only has 357 fables out of 725, and some are essentially duplicates. Then again, I don’t know that there’s any one standard version, and they probably weren’t all written by the same author anyway. I’ve obviously come across many of these in other formats, like children’s books and Sesame Street segments, but they tend to only include the most famous and kid-friendly.

According to Herodotus, Aesop was a Greek slave in the sixth century BCE, and it’s said that his death by being thrown off a cliff was predicted by the Oracle of Delphi. The first collection of his work, or at least what was attributed to him, came out around 300 years later, edited by Demetrius of Phalerum, tyrant of Athens. That contained only about 200 stories, and even then it wasn’t clear how many were actually by Aesop, if he even existed. What’s particularly notable about these fables is how short they are. Later retellings often add more details, but these are generally just a few lines. It’s well-known that a lot of them are about animals, often ones that exhibit specific personality traits: foxes and wolves are crafty, sheep are naïve, donkeys are stupid, monkeys are foolish and imitate others, and lions are proud and powerful. One tale is about how the owl is wise, but no longer gives advice because she’s indignant none of the other birds took it in the first place. There’s a story about a monkey who loves one of her children and ignores the other, which gives the impression that this was just something people back in Aesop’s time thought monkeys did. Some fables are just about people, but just about anything can converse when it needs to, including trees, pots, lamps, body parts, and anthropomorphic personifications of ideas. The Greek gods even show up from time to time, using their Roman names, as this seems to have been translated from the Latin. In a sort of just-so story, Jupiter gives a bee a stinger, but only on the condition that it dies after using it. Another one of this sort has Jupiter punish a bunch of thieves by turning them into ants, animals that regularly take from others. That’s a good example of how which animal is the good example isn’t always consistent, as the ants are praised for their hard work when contrasted with the grasshopper in a more famous fable. One of the tales involving deities has Momus, the personification of satire, being thrown out of Olympus for criticizing the work of the other gods.

The version I read isn’t illustrated, but I’m including some relevant pictures here anyway.
Since he thinks a house would be better with wheels, maybe he was ultimately the inventor of the mobile home. Mercury sometimes seems to get the short end of the caduceus, with his being upset in one fable about how much less popular his statue is than those of Jupiter and Juno, and another has a guy who regularly prays to his statue of Mercury only getting anything out of it when he breaks it open and finds money inside. He is, however, the one who rewards honesty in the fable about the golden axe, which was referenced in a Zelda game. Sometimes it’s not entirely clear what the lesson is, or how it relates to the story. Major recurring themes are contentment, not comparing yourself to others, and how tricks will often backfire. A few are political, like “The Wolf and the Lamb” being about how tyrants always justify their actions, “The Frogs Asking for a King” comparing different governing styles, and a few others warning of alliances with the untrustworthy.

The moral of “The Tortoise and the Hare” is often given as “slow and steady wins the race,” but it really seems like more of a warning against arrogance and overconfidence; the tortoise challenges the hare because he’s being a jerk to everybody, and the hare loses because he doesn’t take the race seriously.

Another one that’s pretty confusing in what it’s trying to say is “The Mountain in Labor,” where a mountain gives birth to a mouse.

It’s said to be about making a big deal over nothing, or sometimes more specifically someone making grand speeches but not getting any results. The version I read takes the liberty of giving the moral as “don’t make much ado about nothing,” which I supposed is accurate, but is also a phrase invented much later by Shakespeare. Also, is that implying the mountain is the bad example in the story? Another of these anachronistic references is to Jonathan Swift‘s Lilliput in “The Farmer and the Cranes,” presumably a reference to the myth about pygmies constantly being at war with cranes. A lot of common expressions have their origins in Aesop, or at least that’s how they remained in constant use. I’d been confused by the expression “the hair of the dog that bit you,” but apparently it refers to a kind of ancient sympathetic magic, where dog bites would be treated with dog hair. Aesop gives a variation on this concept, but presents it as a bad idea. In contrast to how I remember first hearing the Town Mouse and Country Mouse story, the original has the Country Mouse scared by dogs rather than a cat, even though there are other fables with cats and mice. A similar tale is about a dog in a fancy home inviting an outdoor friend over during a banquet, only for the outdoor dog to be caught and kicked out before he can eat anything. Finally, I’ll mention one that just seems insane to me, about a guy trying to clean the black off an Ethiopian. I guess there’s a variation on this theme in Jeremiah 13:3.