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Mina is trying to focus on her job as a flight attendant, not the problems with her five-year-old daughter back home, or the fissures in her marriage. But as the plane takes off, Mina receives a chilling note from an anonymous passenger: “The following instructions will save your daughter’s life…” When one passenger is killed and then another, Mina knows she must act. But which lives does she save: Her passengers…or her own daughter and husband who are in grave distress back at home? It’s twenty hours to landing. A lot can happen in twenty hours.
Welcome to Read This Book, the newsletter where I recommend one book for your TBR that I think you’re going to love! Genre fiction is my wheelhouse, and about 90% of my personal TBR, so if you’re looking for recommendations in horror, fantasy, or romance, I’ve got you covered!
One thing guaranteed to get me to pick up a book is finding out that it’s an adaptation or retelling of a story I love. Adaptations tend to garner mixed reactions from readers. They seem to either love the chance to revisit an old favorite or to entirely forswear retellings as unimaginative, pale imitations of the books they loved. I fall decidedly into the former group. Also known as: group “all content of a thing I love is good content, even if it’s objectively terrible”. This week’s recommendation, however, is anything but terrible. Rather, it is one of the best adaptations of a classic work that I have read in recent years.
Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley
Chances are, if you follow any kind of bookish content on the social media platform of your choosing, you heard about Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf translation when it smashed onto the scene last August. I’ve been a fan of Beowulf for years, and was introduced to the Seamus Heaney translation (probably the favorite go-to edition before Headley rumbled up with her bro-tastic new translation) in my Medieval Lit class, and while it’s certainly poetic I do remember feeling a bit underwhelmed. Like something of the bravado and blustering of the tale was lost in Heaney’s more staid take on the Old English classic. And then along came Headley, with a translation that begins, in a legendary take on the hotly debated “hwæt”, with “Bro!”, and proceeds to lay down the tale of a swaggering, bawdy, braggadocious band of warriors who are fueled as much by arrogance as by bravery.
Unsurprisingly, given the success of Headley’s novel The Mere Wife, some of the most memorable passages in her Beowulf are those pertaining to the figure of Grendel’s mother. In the introduction, Headley talks at length about her as the inspiration, not just for The Mere Wife but for her translation of Beowulf itself. An oft sidelined or outright maligned figure, Grendel’s mother is seldom given her due as a grieving parent with a blood debt to settle. It was a real delight to see Headley cast the “mighty mere-wife” as a warrior worth her mettle, and not just another mindless monster for Beowulf to bloody.
Whether Headley’s translation is your first Beowulf, or the chance to revisit an old favorite in a new guise, I highly recommend that you add a copy to your TBR.
Happy Reading!
Jessica