Sunday Salon: Want To Join Us in an Atwood Read?

My friend Col and I are planning on reading Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad together, and we want to invite you to join us. We'll be reading it the week of May 23 through May 28, 2011, with a review to be posted on Monday, May 30. Of course, if anything strikes our fancy before the 30th, we may post on that as well.

If you're reading for the Read-a-Myth Challenge, or the Once Upon a Time 5 Challenge, this would be a perfect fit.

Here are some reviews to further pique your curiosity:

“In this exquisitely poised book, Atwood blends intimate humour with a finely tempered outrage at the terrible injustice of the maids, phrasing both in language as potent as a curse.” –Sunday Times (UK)

“Penelope flies with the help of the sardonic, dead-pan voice Atwood lends her, a tone — half Dorothy Parker, half Desperate Housewives.” –The Independent (UK)

“Alter[s] one’s point of view toward [the story], imbuing it with a modern sensibility yet revealing some eternal truths about men, women, and the issue of power, including the power to shape a narrative. . . . Atwood shows with intelligence and wit just how complicated and unpretty love can be.” –O, The Oprah Magazine

"Along with her presentation of the hallucinatory maids and Penelope’s straight talk about her husband, her girly laments about the ferocious competition of Helen and her queenly worries about fending off the suitors, Atwood’s brilliance emerges in the skillful way she has woven her own research on the anthropological underpinnings of Homer’s epic into the patterns of her own stylized version of the poem. . . . A fascinating and rather attractive version of this old, old story, a creation tale about the founding of our civilization meant to be heard over and over and over.” –Chicago Tribune

Will you join us?