I used to be a big reader but have fallen out of the habit lately; I generally read
on trains and buses but I'm easily distracted there so have recently tended to just
watch something with the earphones in to block noise out. But I should probably try
to catch up on the books I actually want to read, and with a couple of favourite
authors having new (and not that long) books out now's a good time. Neil Gaiman is
of course a fan of weaving various mythologies into his fiction but the Norse myths
have turned up more often than most so they're clearly favourites of his. He retells
the stories in
Norse Mythology, which aims to create a single narrative out
of them. Compared to most mythologies there aren't many surviving stories of the
Norse gods, and they mostly revolve around Odin's immediate family and especially
Thor and Loki. So they do lend themselves to being told as a single story, although
obviously it's still episodic. I've seen bits and pieces of these myths before
(admittedly, probably mostly in Gaiman's other work) but this is the clearest
version of them I've read.
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