(Also, there was never a bad time to read Mary Renault.)
Almost the whole of Mary Renault’s oeuvre is being put into e-book format as of next week. !!!!!! As you may know if you have hung around this blog or reviewed Song of Achilles or spoken of Mary Renault at all in any way ever, I am a huge huge HUGE fan of hers. My lovely mother handed me Fire from Heaven when I was thirteen or so, and I have loved Mary Renault ever since then. No author I have ever read before or since has managed to give such a credible sense of place to a story about ancient Greece; and very few authors of my experience are able to hang so much emotional weight on what remains unsaid among her characters.
Since Mary Renault is great and you all probably wanted to read her books anyway, would anyone be interested in some sort of Mary Renault week? I was thinking the week of the 23rd, as that will give us all a little time to read her books and compose posts about them. I shall write about my very favorite Mary Renault book, The Charioteer, as well as about my very close next favorite, The Persian Boy. I am also hoping to con Mumsy into doing a guest/conversation post about The King Must Die, as that was her gateway drug to Mary Renault. And then I will also do posts rounding up links from anyone else who has posted about her.
SO. Anyone else feel like it? I’m trying not to call anyone out in particular but some of y’all have spoken to me before about wanting to read Mary Renault and I feel like there is no time like the present! I very, very much want her to be more widely read in the present day so that I will have a larger group of people to talk about her with.