[positive upbeat music plays in background]
SARAH FRENCH: Hello, and welcome to the Stories that Change Us, a Me/Us/sU production. I’m Sarah French.
MITCH ROSHANNON: I’m Mitch Roshannon.
AYLA NYRIESE: and I’m Ayla Nyriese.
SARAH F: Today we’ll be exploring just a few of the ways that stories impact our lives. So if you’re interested in how stories become books and how diversity works in publishing,
MITCH: The wonders of narrative gaming and the dangers if faces today
AYLA: or an interview with a best-selling author and why we keep seeing Greek myths,
SARAH F: stick around! All of that and more is just an instrumental break away.
[music fades out to silence]
MITCH: So as you just heard this episode is all about story so what better way to start than to discuss the stories that have changed us; stuck to us like a good rip dinner or mushroom barbeque for all you vegans out there. So what are the stories that changed us?
SARAH F: Uh, we’ve been asking people this question all week for a later segment in the podcast and I think I’ve formulated my answer if someone asked me specifically what is your favorite story. I’d have to say The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen and not like the ones Disney-fied or the one that he like fixed later because people told me it’s too depressing but the one where like she sees her love and decides that she can’t kill him and leaps into the ocean and becomes seafoam and never exists ever again.
AYLA: I mean that’s fair… [laughs] I think my answer always changes from day to day, so I have like a list of stories that I can say changes us… changed me, not us. There’s not a specific story…
SARAH F: Oh, I have so many.
AYLA: I grew up on Harry Potter like I think a lot of us did.
SARAH F: Yeah. And I think, I mean that’s on my list too I think that that community that arose around those books not just the books themselves like really formed this generation.
MITCH: I’m one of the writing majors on this campus that has never uh, experienced the books of Harry Potter though I suppose I could say that I’ve been influenced somewhat by the movies uh, the movies are a story as well, maybe not exactly the same story. For me, funny enough the first story I think of is the narrative arc surrounding Bonnie McFarlane in the first Red Dead Redemption video game by Rockstar games. She’s this really cool sort of like cowboy cowgirl woman running her own farm as her aged father kind of gets too old to do it himself, and throughout this arc just all of this stuff happens to her over and over again like the barn is burned down by oh my god what are they called… like cattle… stealers? What do you call them? A group of bandits that steal cows uh, for a living come in and take a bunch of her herd and then eventually take her all the while she’s this incredibly strong woman trying to make it in the wild west and it’s a heartbreaking story but it’s one that has really stuck with me.
SARAH F: Yeah, that’s neat. Now I’m sad!
MITCH: It is, it’s very sad. A couple of these that I’ve written down for this [points to pre-made list of stories that changed him] are very sad stories.
AYLA: Oh
SARAH F: I mean, I have that too I’ve written down uh, The Bridge to Tarabithia cause I think that is the first book that I like stayed up past my bedtime reading and like til like three in the morning and just like sat in my bed at three in the morning like sobbing um, [laughs] I was like probably nine or ten and was like “this is sad why are books sad? Why can’t it have a happy ending?” because that’s like what you get when you’re a kid is like
MITCH: mm-hm
SARAH F: the cushy little happy ending, although [pauses] not always.
AYLA: I know, um, I went through a phase when I anything uh that probably should have come with a trigger warning for middle schoolers so I read a lot of Laurie Halse Anderson like Speak and Wintergirls
SARAH F: Yeah
AYLA: and that’s not a happy story by any stretch of the imagination um, and like I also read Stolen which is by Lucy Christopher and I know that includes like a kidnap and Stockholm syndrome but I like the complexity of all of these situations and how nothing was laid down and had a happy ending, but then at the same time I would read a fairy tale and be happy with that too.
SARAH F: Well I know like when I was going through, because we all have lists in front of us cause we have a lot of stories we like, we’re English majors after all the theme I think I saw through mine is like main characters or characters who are sort of exiled from main community or who are really different and who like strike out on their own and do really well and like change the world or something which is everything from like The Lorax to like Jane Goodall’s book Through a Window which is about her thirty years with the champanzees in Gombe in Tanzania. I don’t know that’s always like sort of spoke to me because I’m like the weird odd one out usually.
MITCH: I’d be remised if I didn’t say the name Barbara Kingsolver. Realistically The Poisonwood Bible was the first novel that I read that I didn’t hate and I have since then gone on to buy every novel, short story, and essay collection she has written.
[Random inaudible mumbling about needing to get to next segment.]
SARAH F: I have a lot more books written here dude.
MITCH: Yeah, I know.
[all laugh]
MITCH: So I was going to say um…
SARAH F: Do we wanna like take turns yelling books into the microphone?
MITCH: That’s, I, I’m thinking umm… [motions to just do that]
SARAH F: Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin
AYLA: The Cry of the Icemark by Stuart Hill
MITCH: Such, Such Were the Joys by George Orwell
SARAH: The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
AYLA: Cassandra Clare’s The Moral Instruments
MITCH: Essays from the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka
SARAH F: The Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
AYLA: The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede
MITCH: Vivas To Those Who Have Failed by Martín Espada
SARAH F: Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
“The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
MITCH: The Time Machine by…?
ALL: H.G. Wells
SARAH F: Les Misèrables by Victor Hugo
We just listed off a ton of books but I was just thinking about this one book that I read when I was in middle school that really stuck with me which is Everyday by David Levithan and that was the first book that I’d ever read that had a character who was non-binary and I didn’t even know what that was so that was like a really cool moment for me because that was the first time I saw someone who was reflected like in a part of the lgbt community that even they don’t talk about uh, that was a main character in a book and I think that’s really important.
AYLA: Yeah, and you’re [referring to Sarah] going to talk more about diversity
SARAH F: Yes!
AYLA: In the next segment.
[light, melodic piano music plays in the background]
SARAH F: When we talk about stories, we’re most often talking about books, whether it was our favorite novel, a fairy tale that was turned into a book, or old tomes of history. When we talked with people about their favorite stories, which you’ll hear about a little later on, we got a running theme throughout a lot of answers: people like seeing themselves represented in books. So we wanted to take a closer look at diversity and go straight to the source, which is book publishing. A study done in 2015 by Jason Lowe and Hannah Elrich showed the abysmal state of publishing in the US. In the industry overall, they found that 79% of people were white/caucasian, 78% were cis-gendered female, with less than 1% trans people, 88% were heterosexual and 92% were non-disabled. And it’s even worse in the editorial departments, where they actually pick which books get published. So what has changed since then? And why is this so important? I wanted to get some expert opinions.
The first person I talked with was Dr. Laurence Roth, who is the founder of the publishing and editing and publishing program here at Susquehanna and co-chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing. He brought up some similar studies to the ones I just mentioned, and what our next steps might be.
DR. ROTH: In Franco Moretti’s Stanford Lit Lab, they actually do a study and they ask about what constitutes the 20th century cannon and they put it together in a way that they thought was best able to capture some of the market information, so they had the Publisher’s Weekly and bestseller lists, but also the Postcolonial Association’s list of great books from the 20th century. And though you had that kind of amazing diversity, it’s incredible that really when you look at the data literally in pie charts, we see the exact same thing we knew we were going to see. Which isn’t to say that doing that kind of digital distant reading isn’t valuable, but that it really puts into stark relief the fact that even when you factor in readers like the Postcolonial Studies Association, that we’re still seeing the same kinds of numbers that you just quoted. Does that mean we’re back to square one? I don’t think so. I think that the great thing about Stanford lit lab, the great thing about the numbers you just cited, and the fact that people know those, is that we kind of have to hammer that information home; we think we’re changing, look it’s not changing, we think we’re changing, look it’s not changing. And hopefully that will at least get through at some point. But I think it’s going to continue to be a battle because if we just have our sights set on New York trade publishing, then we’re up against some market forces that are very intractable. Not impossible to move, but really intractable, and we’ll count our victories in singles.
SARAH F: While that wasn’t exactly the uplifting message I’d hoped for, he’s absolutely right. To look a little bit further into the big houses that Dr. Roth spoke of, I called Jessica Dartnell, an SU alum who works in the sales department at a publishing house in New York. The first question I asked her was about diversity in publishing.
JESSICA: I think, um, in the past few years things have gotten a lot better. Where, you know, you’re seeing more diverse books on shelves in the bookstores, you’re hearing about more authors who are coming from all these different backgrounds and different cultures, but I think it’s also easy for me to say, living in a big city like New York, that these are so prevalent in the stores and now in the public eye. Whereas, you know, if you go to a smaller town it may not be the case where these books are front and center or even making it into the stores at all. And I do think, as well, that diverse books may not always be getting the marketing and publicity muscle behind them to promote the sales. And I think we could definitely be supporting more diverse books with those– you know, running articles about them and doing more events in stores with these authors. But I think that there is a demand for it and I definitely think we could be doing better– we could always be doing better, getting more diverse books from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds and making sure that, you know, they’re falling into– not just the hands of people who are seeking that because they want to be reflected in the stories that they read, but people who aren’t necessarily seeking that or even knowing that these titles exist.
SARAH F: Jessica has been in publishing for more than a year now, so I asked her what her favorite part about working in the industry was, and why she chose to devote her life to stories.
JESSICA: Coming from a small town where, you know, you kind of get picked on in school if you like to read because it’s nerdy or whatever, it has been so cool to be surrounded by people who are also passionate about reading and about literature.
SARAH F: Finally, I talked with a friend of mine to get an idea of how literary magazines look at diversity.
JOSH: My name is Joshua Mercier and currently I am on staff at The Sanctuary Magazine.
SARAH F: I asked him how he saw diversity in big publishers and smaller magazines.
JOSH: I would say that it’s something that’s getting better with time, but it’s still not at the place that it needs to be. I mean, we’re seeing a lot more LGBT fiction and fiction with more characters of color, more disabled characters, etcetera, but it’s still very much like “books about gay characters are still gay books.” And they’re almost always YA novels or they’re raunchy adult novels and those are the only two perspectives that we’re consistently getting. And I do think that it’s extremely important to have young adult novels for gay and trans teenagers who are figuring themselves out– I think it’s really a time in your life when you need those kinds of books, but I think that that’s not the only demographic that needs them. Particularly in terms of what we’re seeing published, I would imagine that it’s also reflected in people who are working in the industry. From what I understand, the industry itself is still not really diverse enough to support the kind of diversity we’re looking for.
SARAH F: I wanted to know if he knew how to get that diversity, and how they were handling it at The Sanctuary.
JOSH: The Sanctuary is a very heavily, especially LGBT panel of people who are curating the content for The Sanctuary. So, what that ends up being is that a lot of LGBT creators are being, you know, accepted and published because the people reading the content are better able to sympathize and empathize with the content they submitted, especially with LGBT creators. That’s definitely one of several reasons [chuckles] that there need to be more marginalized creators in the publishing industry itself because you’re just going to see more of that kind of content when you have the people in charge who are able to empathize with that.
SARAH F: So what does all this mean for publishing in the future? Hopefully it’s positive. Just the fact that we’re having these conversations and then going into the industry to change things is going to have an impact on the way that publishing works in the future. We want to live in a world where everyone has stories that they can connect with, and stories that change them.
Before I let them go, I asked each interviewee if they had read any good diverse books lately.
DR. ROTH: Now, it’s called The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten and I really really like the way that this book is both colloquial and scholarly at the same time and I thought it was just a really brilliant intervention into Network Theorizing.
SARAH F: That’s really neat.
DR. ROTH: And I don’t know anyone else that’s talking about that book!
JOSH: Actually, over the summer I bought Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. So I’m actually, like, over a year late to this party– I think everyone who read this read it a really long time ago, but I tore through it in, like, two days I think. Because I just… it had been so long since I felt so connected to a book– I cried like four times reading it. [laughs] And it was one of those things that kind of reminded me why we fight so hard for representation in the first place and why it does matter so much. So, Aristotle and Dante is about two sixteen year old boys, both, I think, are indigenous Mexican, and obviously, you know, I couldn’t relate to every single experience they had, but there were a lot of things like the dynamic they had with their parents, the dynamic they had with the people around them, and their kind of very, you know, contrasting, yin and yang type personalities, and that being what made them so compatible as people. And it was really special to read and it felt really real and sincere and you don’t always get that kind of depth with gay fiction and this was one of the first books that I really felt a connection to in a long time.
JESSICA: Recently I read There There by Tommy Orange, which, you know, that one did have a lot of marketing and publicity behind it. I was reading about it on Shelf Awareness, Publisher’s Weekly, and definitely it was at the front of people’s minds I think, when it was published. So that one I did check out.
And then I also read Pachinko, recently, by Min Jin Lee. Both of these books are really good, but I tend to also try not to just read bestsellers. I think sometimes diverse authors and these stories are coming from independent houses and not necessarily making it onto these lists.
I recently read Only Drunks and Children Tell The Truth which is a Native American play. It’s so good! I actually re-read it because it was something that we had studied my freshman year in theatre class.
Don’t always look on the bestselling lists for what you want to read. There’s definitely so many diverse authors coming from other houses that aren’t getting the attention that they should.
[La Voie Est Libre fades in]
AYLA: In the small town of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, nestled between a hair salon and a private residence, sits D. J. Ernst Books. Advertising the sale of both used and rare books, D. J. Ernst Books was established in 1975. The owner of the store, Donald J. Ernst, also recognized as Homer, keeps flexible hours, closing the store every Sunday and Wednesday, and opening from around 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every other day. Usually. You should probably call ahead. But what makes D.J. Ernst Special? How is this bookstore different? Well, besides the original organization system and the perennial presence of the store, Homer himself is known to the residents of the town and the nearby University for his unique personality and unusual stories. Join us as we take a trip to D. J. Ernst; who knows what we’ll learn?
[ La Voie Est Libre fades out]
MITCH: [static, audio sounds slightly grainy] Ayla will just run through the questions, talk for a short or as long as you want
DJ “HOMER” ERNST: Ayla?
AYLA: Ayla
HOMER: Okay. Did your parents read Clan of the Cave Bear?
AYLA: That’s where my name is from. [laughs]
AYLA: [clear audio returns] I’m twenty-one, and Homer is the first person I’ve ever met who’s known where my name comes from. When I got over the surprise, I started off with a simple question.
AYLA: [static returns] What are your favorite stories or books?
HOMER: [clears throat] well, there are a lot, but um, I have one answer to that, which is Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Whatever I’m reading seems to be really good, you know [chuckle], but I keep going back to Cannery Row.
AYLA: [clear audio] From there we moved on to what types of books Homer chooses to sell, and how a former Susquehanna University professor helped to influence Homer’s taste in literature.
HOMER: I feel like I’m giving somebody value for their money, you know if I talk them into buying a good book. Tom Bailey started as I said minutes ago, or hours ago, I’m really babbling here. He came in and bought an Andre Dubus book and slapped [Hand is slapped onto counter] it down onto the counter. Paid a dollar for it. And he gave it to me. He bought it from me, paid me, and he said “here, it’s yours, read it.” So, he started turning me on to who was hot, you know, and then he started bringing his classes in here, and I noticed what he was pushing.
Annie Dillard was one he really liked. So I started buying all the Annie Dillard books I could. And everything he was pushing, like The Perfect Storm, he was selling that over and over, and he was selling Seabiscuit [grough voice, as Tom] “That’s a good one.” And he, you know, over the years he made lists, like, for reading over the summer, or whatever, for this particular course. Stuff as weird as Charlotte’s Web. So I started buying all the copies I could of Charlotte’s Web. But now he’s not there anymore, so Annie Dillard isn’t selling very well anymore. I have Faulkner that’s kind of languishing, but I still buy that kind of stuff. James Joyce I think is really good. Personally I push Joseph Campbell and the Loren Eiseley that I described to you. He’s phenomenal, Loren Eiseley. Essays. Barbara Kingsolver writes some somewhat similar to Loren Eiseley essays. Again, she’s a scientist writer.
MITCH: Mmm-hmm
HOMER: As I get older, I’m more aware than ever, even though I hit that tree at about forty miles per hour, and survived, I’m more than ever aware of mortality and that this collection of chemicals that’s inside my skin is not going to last forever, is not going to be me. I don’t believe that I’m going to go to Elysium fields and be me. [Mitch and Ayla laugh quietly] [Homer chuckles] I’m reading more and more stuff about small particle physics and the physics of consciousness and stuff like the and Buddhism so I’m stocking Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism along with physics and books that talk about science and philosophy. That sort of thing. As well as C.S. Lewis. The stuff I don’t stock is books that try to persuade you to deal with the resurrection and that [Ayla laughs loudly] sort of thing. And Jesus and Evangelical type books I’m interested in the History of religion and philosophy itself and scholarly approaches to religion and philosophy. I’ve never been more interested in maintaining that section of my shop than I am now that I approach the later years of my life. And I like to say that almost every good book in this store, including even the serious history books, are all to some extent about the same thing, but especially the literature and poetry, which I don’t read it. I admit I don’t read a lot of poetry. They’re all barking up the same tree. They’re all trying to figure out what is this [pause for a second] experience that we perceive through our brains [questioning] while we’re alive. I was going to say our eyes, but like Helen Keller didn’t have [pause] eyes? [brief silence. Homer moves on] You know, through our whatever senses we have available to us. And you know, that’s got me kind of fired up. Where as thirty years ago, that was the last thing on my mind really. I didn’t even care. I just thought it was all pretty simple. I just thought I was a collection of chemicals that existed for a short time then was gone. But now I’m beginning to wonder if there’s something, some spark that everyone is infused with that existed before and exists after. I just feel that all these books, all these great works in here are trying to figure out what….they’re aiming towards describing important moments in people’s lives that result in a sort of, like a, like when your phone goes ding and someone send you a message [Homer smiles]. Like a crystal clear revelation of some
least some little small part of the truth. Which, when I was your age they were always talking about truth in school, and I always thought that “well yeah” I write in my essays, I had a great teacher in high school for writing. She was the best. She burned out and quit. She makes jewelry now. But, I was always writing what I thought people wanted to hear, and so I used that word a lot. “Truth and beauty. Truth is beauty, beauty is truth.” I didn’t have a clue what it really meant. Now I think I have more of a clue because I have years behind me. That’s a lot of pages behind me too. But I’ve also seen people born and die and you know, I’ve lost people close to me. I’ve just seen a lot more.
[La Voie Est Libre fades in and then out]
MITCH: This episode of Me/Us/sU is brought to you by D.J. Ernst Bookstore. Placed close to the heart of Selinsgrove Pennsylvania on market street, D.J. Ernst has a wide variety of used and rare books of exceptional quality. Frequently claimed to have one of the best curated selections of books in fiction, mythology, philosophy, and history. Starting with prices as low as .50 cents, there is something for everyone at D.J. Ernst. Open daily from 10AM to 4PM. Closed Wednesdays and Sundays.
[static]
[8-bit game music plays]
[static]
MITCH: The most exciting time to be alive when I was little was Christmas. Family was great and the food was fantastic, but the greatest gift of all was the actual gift. I swear, I’m not shallow, or materialistic; it’s just that every Christmas pretty much without fail I asked for a new video game, something I had seen online or that had been suggested to me by my friends at school. I would run downstairs to find my new pair of pajamas for the year and a few little book sized presents, all of them stories, video games.
I haven’t played it in years, but I can still remember the ending of Bioshock,
[static]
[ending of Bioshock plays, “They offered you the city, and you refused it, and what did you do instead? What I’ve come to expect of you, you saved them, you gave them the one thing that was stolen from them. A chance, a chance to learn, to find love, to live; and in the end what was your reward? You never said, but I think I know. A family”]
MITCH: (following along to the audio) “you never said, but I think I know, a family.” It’s a beautiful game, with an engaging story arc, and my connection to that story is what made me a writer. I wanted to put words on a page as powerful as the ones I read and listened to in video game story arcs. The ideals of proper leadership stick with me as well, especially this quote here from Assassin’s Creed.
[static]
[Assassin’s Creed scene audio plays, “The world is a tapestry of many colors and patterns, a just leader would celebrate this, not seek to unravel it.”
“He fears the disorder that comes from difference.”
“That is why we make laws to live by, a common that applies to all in equal measure.”]
[static]
MITCH: These games are beautiful pieces of art, and my heart yearns to learn more of their stories just as others yearn for the next piece of a book collection. I follow the work of Rockstar Games like many follow the work of Random Penguin. Based on my research, I believe many others out there feel similarly, but we’ll get back to that later.
Despite all my love and nostalgia for the world of gaming and the narratives that live within them, there’s some reason to believe that narrative gaming is in danger.
On September 21st, 2018 around 250 employees entered a large conference room at Telltale Games and were told they had thirty minutes to pick up and leave. They were given their final paychecks and encouraged to apply for unemployment before the end of the day. The company went from an extensive collection of talented people to just the 25 required to finish up final projects; the rest of their employees left jobless and confused. Those 25 will inevitably join them, biding out their time on a sinking ship.
Telltale Games was a video game developer in San Rafael, California which gained a lot of traction as a major game developer in 2012 when it won the VGX (abbreviation for Vector Graphics) Award for Game of the Year for The Walking Dead and Studio of the Year, both big wins which put Telltale games on the gaming industry’s radar as a developer to be taken seriously. Those awards didn’t help them much when it came time to pay the bills and a major funder pulled out, leaving Telltale with no option but to begin the process of closing its doors. They were a well-known game developer making one of the best narrative gaming experiences in their The Walking Dead episodes, yet with a flash, they’re gone like many other gaming companies before them leaving gamers to ask how a company succeeding SO heavily could come to such an untimely end when heavily narrative games seem to be the future of the medium.
[8-bit music fades in and cuts]
[static]
[“Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters, the silence is your answer”]
[static]
[8-bit music returns and fades out]
MITCH: That transition is an audio clip of Javik from Mass Effect, the last of a Promethean race destroyed by war. Narrative has become an increasingly important part of any gaming experience as technology has advanced within the industry. In fact, while many games such as Space Invaders, Tetris, and Mario remain the most profitable games of all time, at least half of all games found on the most profitable list of 2017 are narrative in nature; just a few of these titles being Grand Theft Auto V, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Resident Evil 7, and Mass Effect: Andromeda.
We’re buying into this type of storytelling, so, why are these companies failing? After some research, I’ve found that the answer isn’t quite as cut and dry as I was expecting it to be. To understand, I wanted to figure out why people play games in the first place. I found a study reported on in 2011 originally published in Psychological Science that did just that. Their conclusion isn’t all that surprising. Dr. Andy Przybyiski explains “A game can be more fun when you get the chance to act and be like your ideal self. The attraction to playing videogames […] is that it gives people the chance to think about a role they would ideally like to take.” So we play games because they allow us to daydream, to trial life. Dr. Przybyiski also slightly discusses escapism, but he doesn’t demonize it the way some have in the past. He says “I was heartened by the findings which showed that people were not running away from themselves but running towards their ideals. They are not escaping to nowhere they are escaping to somewhere.” So we use games to understand who we want to be, what we ideally look like.
I thought it important to check a few other places as well. I found a blog about addiction, that listed ten other reasons that people play besides addiction. The list was: entertainment, challenge, boredom, connectedness, emotional satisfaction, alternative to bad behaviors, escapism, practice for life skills, stress relief, and help in making friends. Take any one of these with a grain of salt, and I’m sure there are plenty of people with answers that don’t fit nicely in a box, but it’s a start. A few other sources and testimonies backed up most of these ideas. We play to be entertained, engaged, challenged, connected to larger communities, and to learn and escape from life; not all that different from other forms of media really.
[8-bit music fades in and cuts]
[static]
[“You can’t break a man the way you brea- a dog or a horse, the harder you beat a man, the taller he stands”]
[static]
[8-bit music returns and fades out]
MITCH: That audio log comes from The Jackal character from Far Cry 2, a major arms dealer responsible for supplying both sides of over 15 wars in Africa. We know why people play video games in general. What about narrative specifically? I found an online survey promoted by Polygon, a rather well-established games and entertainment website.
After what feels like a never-ending set of questions, the survey shows a percentage of how much I care about a certain part of gaming as compared to the average gamer.
This quiz told me a lot in terms of what I care about compared to the entirety of other people who have taken the test. The different segments of gaming are accomplishment, sensory, routine, emotional, rules, social, and content. For the sake of this subject, I am most interested in content and emotional, as they make up together what I would define as narrative.
My emotional care score was 55 percent and my content 66 percent; meaning that out of 100 that is how much I care about those concepts. All around, these were the highest percentage scores I had.
This in and of itself isn’t that ground-breaking, but when I look at the percentages compared to world things get a bit more interesting. I’ll save you the math I had to do to get these percentages and just give the numbers. 45 percent of people care more than me about emotion and 34 percent more about content: meaning approximately 40 percent of gamers (the average of the content and emotional values) care more about narrative than the man reading this script on narrative. I would call that significant. The point: narrative in gaming does matter, gamers say so.
[8-bit music fades in and cuts]
[static]
[“A man chooses. A slave obeys.”]
[static]
[8-bit music returns and fades out]
MITCH: That audio log is spoken by the character Andrew Ryan in Bioshock, the creator of the underwater city you just helped his, also evil, enemy, Frank Fontaine destroy.
So back to the question. If narrative in games is cared about as much as it is, and gamers care about video games, then why would a company so invested in story go bankrupt and die overnight? This answer is simple: game development is a volatile industry. Tom Crago, Chief Executive Officer of Tantalus Media, formerly Tantalus Interactive has said, “in an industry as volatile as video games, it’s impossible to put your hand on your heart and say to any of your developers that their job is going to be secure for the next five or ten years. I feel like anyone who does that is kidding themselves,” Harsh words, but not untrue; and Tantalus Media is still around today meaning that the mindset and actions Crago has taken to be transparent with his staff about the financial stability of the company is working.
This has been understood for years. Game development is volatile. Things either work or they don’t and when they don’t companies tend to go under. The margin for error in game development is thin, with a lot of profit from one title being invested into the next and lost forever if that next game doesn’t make a good return, leaving little to put into another game following and even less left for paychecks.
Perhaps this means that the way we look at profits in the gaming industry is flawed, and the way we as consumers interact with games is as well. Julie Muncy, a writer at Wired seems to think so. In one of her articles she states, “games are made by people. And if we care about games, at all, we need to care about the people who make them. In fact, I think we need to care about the people a lot more than we care about the games.” Maybe she’s right. Right now, ask anyone what their favorite video game is, the answer will come to them much quicker than if you ask them their favorite game developer.
This is a problem. Not caring about the developers means we are willing to let them flop over a bad game and with that hit comes the end of every good game that company has made. There’s a reason that other volatile industries, like online content such as YouTube creators have found ways other than advertisement (originally their main source of income) to support themselves. They have a following that cares about the creator, not just the content, so they support not just by watching and liking, but by supporting Patreon accounts and buying merchandise, and sitting through some sponsors, which bolsters income through varied sources when a handful of videos don’t do well. Gaming might need to do the same, and we as consumers support them in doing so.
Instead of just buying the games when they’re good, maybe we all put forth a certain amount of money per month for a developer we believe in, we give them what they need to keep the lights on and their workers paid, even when a game flounders upon release. Then a company like Telltale, wouldn’t be left penniless after a single failure. They can pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and promise to do better next time. And if they do better next time, we can all know that we helped create that by remembering that beautiful stories and wonder filled narratives are still a business and will die if we don’t support them.
I mentioned this at the beginning, but I think it’s worth mentioning again that video games are stories like any other form, and they are capable of touching people in just the same way. For many, video games are the only stories that ever will change them and I think there is something beautiful about that. If it weren’t for video games, I wouldn’t be a writer, I wouldn’t be recording this podcast, maybe I wouldn’t have even gone to college, and my roommate wouldn’t have his dream to write for video games someday. For so many, this form of storytelling matters more than anything else, and I personally can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
I’d like to end with the end of Bendy and the Ink Machine; Joey Drew’s monologue. I don’t know that I can explain here what is so great about this ending monologue, but to give as brief an overview as I can, this is the monologue of a man who has lost everything he worked hard for to his own obsession with it.
[8-bit music fades in and cuts]
[static]
[“Who are we Henry? I thought I knew who I was, but the success starved me. Nothing left but lines on a page. In the end we followed two different roads of our own making. You, a lovely family, me, a crooked empire and my road burned. I let our creations become my life. The truth is, you were always so good at pushing old friend, pushing me to do the right thing. You should have pushed a little harder.”]
[static]
[8-bit music returns and fades out]
[Light melodic piano music fades in]
SARAH F: Here at Me/Us/SU, we spend most of our time on a small liberal arts campus in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. The campus can sometimes become a sort of self-selecting, somewhat isolated microcosm from the outside world, especially the one right outside our campus. Our campus is more diverse in many ways and less diverse in others, and we wanted to see what that looked like in the form of what stories are our favorite– which books, fairy tales, comics, or any other form of stories have influenced the lives of the people we spend time with. [Piano music fades out] I’m very curious to see how much overlap there will be, what sort of media people will come up with when we say “story”, and how many times we get Twilight or 50 Shades of Gray. We also want to know what our campus thinks as a whole about the idea of a story and what constitutes one. Let’s get out on campus and see what stories we can find!
We asked students what their favorite story was and why! Here are some of their answers.
PERSON 1: My favorite book, or just like…?
PERSON 2: My favorite story…
PERSON 3: [strained voice] Give me a second to think!
PERSON 4: So it’s any kind of a story…
PERSON 5: I’m not ready yet!
PERSON 6: Ummm…
PERSON 7: I don’t know! [laughs]
PERSON 8: So what is the question? Like what is my favorite story?
HANNAH: So my favorite story…
PERSON 9: Just for like… Books and stuff?
PERSON 10: I’m sorry… I don’t know.
SARAH F: There was some indecision. But eventually we began to get some real answers.
PERSON 2: I’d have to say one of my favorite stories is Dos Palabras by Isabel Allende. It was my introduction to magical realism and I had read it in Spanish, completely in Spanish, and I was like “This is the one thing I can at least gather some meaning behind.” Um, I just thought it was fun. It didn’t… It wasn’t one of those big books that the regular English teachers were, like, handing out. It’s just a story and it was, like, kind of my introduction into an interesting short story. So I guess that would be my favorite.
PERSON 11: Percy Jackson for the win!
PERSON 12: I think probably any story that has, like, magic in it, with strong women and really fun animal sidekicks.
PERSON 13: Wrapped by Jennifer Bradbury
HANNAH: Well, I guess my favorite story, uh, it’s not like a favorite favorite as in I like it the most, like most favorite stories, but it’s very important to me because it’s the first book I was ever able to read on my own. And it was called Hannah, which is also my name, so that definitely plays into it, but it was about this blind girl who was going to school for the first time and learning how to read and be able to interact with people, which kind of, also kind of spoke to me, because I’m not blind, but I’m dyslexic, so learning to read for me was a struggle as well, so it kinda really resonated with me.
PERSON 12: Princess Bride, I guess.
PERSON 3: Uh, my favorite story is one I read in middle school. And I can’t recall the name of it, but essentially it was about a man who had dissociative identity disorder and he kidnapped a woman and so it explains her entire story being locked up in his basement and then being finally set free. And it kinda goes through the court case as well as what it was like and the experience. So that was kind of cool.
PERSON 13: I’ve got to go with the Ranger’s Apprentice series.
PERSON 7: My favorite story, as of now, is the story of Flint, the play Flint, and it’s about the Flint water crisis in Flint, Michigan. And the reason it’s my favorite story right now is because it tells– I’m going to say story again– it tells people’s stories authentically because it’s the words of actual people living in the circumstance and it describes their emotion and their journey through a certain crisis. And, yeah, I believe this story is impactful because it shows an emotional side to something that most people would just see the words of the headlines on a news channel. But it shows the impact on real people. Yeah. That’s why it’s my favorite story right now.
PERSON 14: JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
PERSON 5: My favorite story is a story by John Gould called Feelers. It’s about a man who leaves his life behind to have this affair with a woman that also left her life behind. They both leave work to essentially have sex over this, like, two-week-long vacation. And they develop, like, a really good relationship. He’s, like, an English teacher so he’s really good at, like, syntax and semantics, so they talk a lot about grammar. And in the end she ends up leaving him after she discovers that she’s pregnant and she asks him if he knows what parthenogenesis is. Which is the idea of virgin births and I’m just obsessed with that idea, so that was my favorite story.
PERSON 15: Grimm’s Fairy Tales
PERSON 16: So I don’t really have a specific favorite story, but I do like a certain kind of story where it’s like, it focuses on the emotional connections between the characters while they are dealing with the catastrophic events, whether it’s to large catastrophic events or just catastrophic to that character. So I like seeing platonic and romantic relationships written well. They have to be written well, otherwise it sucks.
PERSON 17: The Neverending Story is one of my favorite books of all time.
[Piano music fades back in]
SARAH F: I was thinking that we would get a lot of Harry Potter or To Kill A Mockingbird, which was recently voted America’s Favorite Book. Instead we got a really wide range of stories for a wide range of reasons, from strong female characters to a particular interest in parthenogenesis. We also got a few different definitions of story, from book to play to movie to a kind of story arc that you really like. Our definitions of “story” and the ones we consider our favorites are just as diverse and interesting as we are!
[piano music fades out]
[Greek Tragedy begins]
AYLA: We’ve all heard the stories of the Greek myths. The tragic romances, melodramatic gods, and valiant heroes have filled the stories we’ve all experienced, in some way, shape, or form. One of the most well-known stories is that of the Iliad. Whether you’ve read it in its original Greek, suffered through the translated epic in a high school English class, or only seen the rather whitewashed theatrical version we know as Troy, chances are you’re familiar with Paris, Helen, Achilles, and a certain wooden horse that helped the Greeks win the war. In her New York Times Bestselling Novel, The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller recounts the event of the Iliad from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles’ closest companion. However, where previous adaptations of the myth have often whitewashed the characters and neglected to acknowledge the romantic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, Miller wrote her novel with the intent of portraying the diversity showcased within the Iliad, while still remaining true to Homer’s original telling. Her second novel, Circe, continues this trend; focusing on the often-overlooked minor goddess who appears in Homer’s Odyssey. I spoke with Madeline Miller over Skype to see if I could figure out why Greek Mythology has impacted her the way it has, and how her life has influenced her writing
[Greek Tragedy fades away]
AYLA: I started off by asking Madeline Miller what her favorite story was.
MADELINE MILLER: There were so many, um, I, it’s hard to pick just one, absolutely the Greek myths, the Iliad and the Odyssey, my mother used to read my little pieces of those as bedtime stories when I was younger, so they were very formative, but also, the first book I ever read by myself, my mom was reading to me. It’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. You know, a children’s book.
AYLA: Yeah
MADELINE: And she was reading it to me and we got to sort of two chapters from the ending, and she says “okay, we’ll stop, we’ll read the rest tomorrow.” And then she says to me “Don’t read the rest by yourself. And that was like an epiphany, I didn’t even realize I could do that. So as soon as my mother goes downstairs I immediately get out the flashlight and read the ending by myself, the ending is kind of sad, a bunch of the rats dies. And so then I go sobbing down to my mother’s room [laughs while talking] in the middle of the night having read it myself. And I feel like that experience was actually very formative. Is how much a book can move you, and how wholly wrapped up in the world you can be. And that was the experience of so much of my childhood. There were so many books I just lived in their world. [Chuckle] When I got a little bit older things like The Handmaid’s Tale were completely absorbing, more like high school. I loved Lorrie Moore. I reread and reread her books over and over again. The Joy Luck Club I probably have read a hundred times; that was a book I really loved as a child. And ditto for The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende.
AYLA: I then asked her where her love of Greek mythology came from.
MADELINE: Well, I think it came from those early, you know, readings by my mom. But why it stuck as opposed to, you know she read me a lot of stuff, but that. There’s something about it that felt really electric to me as I was hearing it, and I- I have a memory of her reading the first line of the Iliad to me, which goes “Sing goddess of the destructive rage of Achilles.” And there was something about that that just felt so [pause] exciting, and overwhelming, and adult, and interesting, and mysterious. So that was all, um, part of it, and then I loved that it was a system. And you could sort of-I loved to memorize systems as a child. So you know, there were all the gods and the children and they had these powers and this stuff, so I loved that aspects. And we also lived near the Metropolitan Museum of Art; I lived in New York City at that time, and so I’d go and I could see the statues there and that was a whole other piece of it because I loved the art so much, so [trails off]
AYLA: From there, we moved on to what inspired Madeline Miller to increase the focus on diversity within her own novels.
MADELINE: Well, I mean, I think that is one of the aspects that felt son frustrating to me about the original, is how you know, so many voices are silenced in the service of the traditional male heroic story. There are few female characters, but they get very very little screen time as it is. Um, you know, people of color, it sort of, people of color, the the, um, gay focus, or the focus on a same sex marital relationship is a little bit different because in the ancient world that was much more of an accepted tradition. Um, Plato interpreted Achilles and Patroclus as lovers and Aeschylus, and that was sort of the interpretation history, although not everyone interpreted them that way. But I wanted to make sure that that was back in the record. I felt like, when I had went to school, that had pretty much dropped out, and I think that there’s more attention paid to it nowadays, but a lot of that stuff is. Very much not talked about or whispered about or erased from the record.
AYLA: Mm-hmm
MADELINE: And so for me, part of the whole point of writing this was to bring that back in. Briseis, also, as a character, in the original is a princess. I was really not interested in that. [Ayla laughs] There are plenty of aristocrats in the story already. And so it was really important for me, to have her be a farmer’s daughter. Because in the Iliad there’s sort of all this focus on what’s happening to the kings and the princes and the city and the palace, and you know, all of that intrigue. But, you now, the reason the Greeks would have been able to stay for ten years is because they would have been absolutely destroying all the neighboring farms. [Ayla makes a noise in ascent] That’s where they would have been getting all of their food from. They would have been raiding and destroying and stealing and taking the daughters as slaves. And all of that, I wanted that to be part of the story, that this was affecting these people who had absolutely no stake in the war no say in the war no say in the war and were, you know, complete collateral damage, but their lives are ruined by the war as well.
AYLA: Miller then mentioned one of the more difficult parts of including positive diversity within The Song of Achilles
MADELINE: The only thing that really, um, was unfortunate, was that Achilles and Patroclus do both, spoiler, die at the end of their story. And you know, I was very aware of that sort of, you know, story about gay stories ending in tragedy. But I felt like that was so baked into the myth, and you know, Odysseus even sees them together in the underworld in the Odyssey so there’s this real, I didn’t feel like I could change that, but within that I tried to give them the happiest ending that I could.
AYLA: I mentioned how the intersectionality of the novel was especially impactful on our campus, given the prevalence of the creative writing program, and how most students are used to a whitewashed version of the gods.
MADELINE: It is, and well, that’s the other thing I wanted to add. I grew up reading D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which I think a lot of people do, but the gods are sooo white and blonde, which is really disturbing. Because you know, one of the things that the Nazis did is they claimed all that Greek literature and you know, they were sort of like, “we are the inheritors of the Greeks”, and so there was this like weird transformation of the ancient Greeks into these like blonde haired blue eyed, you know, Arian beings. So, that’s one of my- I really wanted to push against that. Now, in the original Iliad, Achilles is described as Xanthos, which means like “light haired.” Now, we don’t know how blonde that blonde was. Um, like, I don’t think it means like, California platinum blonde, probably it means more like light brow. But you know, so we have a few color hints, but basically, the Greeks did not look like the Germans in the 1950s, and I think it’s really important to remember that. And you know, take out that weird racism that has gotten layered over it.
AYLA: After that we made the jump to Miller’s second novel, Circe. Circe has been heralded as a feminist novel, and I asked if that was something Miller set out to do, and if the praises from her first two books was impacting her feelings about writing her next novel.
MADELINE: I absolutely wanted it to be a feminist book from the beginning; that was completely part of the project. I was so frustrated by the scene in the Iliad- sorry- in the Odyssey where they meet and Circe is this powerful exciting figure. She turns men into pigs. She has tame lions and wolves. And then Odysseus pulls his sword on her and like, that’s it, she screams and she kneels before him and she begs for mercy and it’s just like, ugh, that’s one of those scenes where as, you know, a woman reading the story you just feel so shut out. It feels like here’s this female character who has to be completely subsumed to the male’s story, she has to serve the man’s story. And, you know, it doesn’t matter how interesting she is, she has to forced down into her place [scoffs] so she can then serve the heroic narrative. And so I really wanted to say okay let’s take away the heroic layer, you know, all that stuff that’s been put on top of that. How would Circe feel about that moment? How would it look like if she didn’t have to serve Odysseus’s story. You know, if we take this as Odysseus version of the story and we try to imagine her voice. And I was wanted to, um, [pause] make her story have all the stuff about it that has nothing to do with Odysseus. You know, she’s a Cameo in the Odyssey. She’s only in two plus books of the Odyssey and so I very deliberately only put Odysseus in two plus chapters of the novel [laughs while talking for a second] because um, I really wanted it to be about her life, you know, from beginning to sort of where the story needs here. And most of that has nothing to do with Odysseus. And she ends up having all of these adventures and all this exciting stuff that is holding her own. And I also wanted to give her an epic scope. I think that women, as I mentioned, have been traditionally shut out of epic. You know, that the epic stories were, for the most part, composed by men. I mean, Homer, question mark. Was there even a Homer? But I mean, you know, um, and about male protagonists and so putting Circe at the center of her own story and giving her you know, that sort of gods and monsters and destiny and finding her own way and making mistakes and being incredibly courageous; all the things that male heroes get to do in epics I wanted her to kind of have the same scope. So um, and in terms of how it makes me think. Um, these things are, I love how people have seen that in a book because it was so important to me to put it in. Um. And you know I think there’s some of that also in The Song of Achilles but you, because Patroclus is the narrator and he is male he sort of , he has windows into the female experience and he is much more understanding of it than most men in his sphere, but um, you know, I could really go deeper with Circe and do a lot more with that. And so I mean, I wanna keep telling these stories of people that have been silenced and perspective that have been silenced and, you know, it’s really exciting to me that people are excited about that.
AYLA: Madeline Miller spent ten years writing the Song of Achilles and seven writing Circe. I asked her how spending such a long period of time on the same piece affects her.
MADELINE: Mmmm. I mean I think I spend a lot of time really living in the characters’ heads, or maybe they’re living in my head I don’t know[laughs] it gets a little blurry. I, I really approach my writing kind of like an actor getting into character. I have to really be able to hear the characters’ voice, and so part of the time it took me to write Circe was to write Patroclus out, who I’d been living with for so long, and then find Circe’s voice, and so I’m sure there will be an adjustment period too where I’m sort of saying goodbye to Circe as I begin to find the voices of my new characters. And because I like to write about characters who’ve been silenced or whose stories haven’t been focused on, I like to work from a first-person narrator because then I’m literally giving them voice. [slight laugh] And so that feels, you know, that feels important. Um [pause] I think [pause] I think one of the things that I find most important about writing and reading is empathy. That I think writing and reading gives you empathy and empathy is one of the greatest gifts that humanity has. It’s our ability to look at someone else and see ourselves in them and see them in us and, you know, reach out to them, and you know, hopefully, if we see them suffering help them. And so, living in another characters’ world and kind of experiencing things through their eyes it’s just- it’s a very powerful experience. It sort of teaches you that empathy, hopefully. And then, you know, as a reader, hopefully then my readers get to experience that world as well. And so I, I can’t quite put my finger on all the ways that those characters have changed me, but I certainly feel that they have. I feel like I’ve sort of walked, I’ve walked with them through their, through their life. And so, you know, sometimes I, I think about, in moments where Circe might be braver than I might be, I think “Come on. I can do this. I’ve imagined myself into the shoes of a character who’s braver than me in this particular moment.”
AYLA: Finally, I closed the interview by asking Madeline Miller how Greek mythology influenced her life.
MADELINE: Um, well, I’m naturally very worried about Hubris [chuckles] so, the idea of, you know, uh, be careful what you say, what you wish for. But I think that might actually be a negative influence. [loud laugh] That, you know, that it made me very worried about, for instance, writing The Song of Achilles in the first place. It sort of felt like “Am I Icarus, putting on my wax wings, flying too close to the sun?” Um, I was very afraid to tell anyone I was working on the book when I was working on it. I didn’t tell any of my professors or any of my peers. So, um, in that sense I think if I had it to do over I would go back and tell myself “don’t worry so much about that” [slight laugh] “don’t worry so much about Hubris. No lightning is gonna strike you.” But I, I also think that it influenced me because I have always felt that mythology- I’ve always been very inspired by mythology because mythology is so universal in the sense that wherever humans come from we tell stories about ourselves. And so even though there are all of these fantastical elements in mythology they’re incredibly human. You know, they’re all about human desires and hopes and grief and loss. There sort of us processing our lives, um, in fantastical form. Um, and I love that there are, that they really do belong to everyone. You know, that the Iliad and the Odyssey are seen as these very elite texts now, but they came out of oral tradition, you know? They came out of grandparents telling their grandchildren these stories and bards telling these stories and this very living, growing tradition. And so, um, that’s very inspiring. That, you know, no one owns these stories. They sort of, they belong to all of us.
[Greek Tragedy fades in and back out]
AYLA: Stories are numerous and because of that, we found it difficult to talk in depth about any given one. Instead, we looked in many ways at the concept of stories, why we tell them, and what they mean to us.
MITCH: In their truest form, stories are our way of preserving our humanity, of having something of ourselves to leave the world when we are gone.
SARAH F: As Terry Pratchett has said, “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.” We believe this is why we create stories and why we read them. We encourage you to think with us about how stories affect our lives and what stories have changed you?
MITCH: Resources used in my narrative gaming segment come from: thenextweb.com, cnbc, goliath, irishhealth.com, addictionblog.org, and MCV UK. My tv static effect comes from soundjay.com.
SARAH F: The songs used in this episode were February and Idea by Kai Engle, Teamwork by Scott Homes, Pim Boy Pocket from DL Sounds.com, La Voie Est Libre by Martijn de Boar, and Greek Tragedy by Plusplus.
AYLA: We’d also like to thank all of our interviewees especially, Jessica Dartnell, DJ (Homer) Ernst, Joshua Mercier, Madeline Miller, and Dr. Laurence Roth.
Below is a list of stories mentioned in this podcast, listed in order by which they appear:
The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen
The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
Bonnie McFarlane’s backstory in Red Dead Redemption
The Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
Stolen by Lucy Christopher
The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
Through A Window: My 30 Years With The Chimpanzees of Gombe by Jane Goodall
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (and everything else she’s ever written)
Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin
The Cry of the Icemark by Stuart Hill
Such, Such Were The Joys by George Orwell
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
The The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare
Essays From The Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations by Mark Slouka
The Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede
Vivas To Those Who Have Failed by Martín Espada
Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
“The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
The Time Machine by HG Wells
Les Misèrables by Victor Hugo
Everyday by David Levithan
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
There There: A Novel by Tommy Orange
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Only Drunks and Children Tell The Truth by Drew Hayden Taylor
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Short Stories by Andre Dubus
Books by Annie Dillard
The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger
Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand
Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
Novels by Faulkner
Books by James Joyce
Books by Joseph Campbell
Books by Loren Eiseley
Stories and Essays by CS Lewis
Dos Palabras by Isabel Allende
The Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan
Wrapped by Jennifer Bradbury
Hannah by Gloria Whelan
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
The Ranger’s Apprentice series by John Flanagan
Flint by José Casas
Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Feelers by John Gould
Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm
The Neverending Story
The Iliad by Homer
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Circe by Madeline Miller
The Odyssey by Homer
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Robert C. O’Brien
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Books by Lorrie Moore
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Book of Greek Myths by D’Aulaires