EssEff

This poll was inspired by this thread:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=216028

deadman_932

I forced myself to read it entirely.

EssEff

Tedious isn't it?

mung bean

Excruciating, although there are some wonderful touches of unintentional humour.

exmormon

of reading it cover-to-cover? That's not how you study a collection of books productively. I've read some parts many times, most parts at least once, and a few parts not at all.

Minimalist

If you did that to a POW it would be considered "torture."

VoxRat

I take "cover to cover" just to mean "all of it" - not what order I read it, or over how long.

cajela

If you're not a biblical scholar, you don't necessarily realise what a diverse collection of books it is *until* you read it... I read it cover to cover as a high school student.

I was a voracious reader of myth in my teens - I also read the Apocrypha, and the entire Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Metamorphoses, plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, the Eddas, Kalevala, Mabinogion, and Milton's Paradise Lost cover to cover... And no doubt more that I've forgotten. Arthuriana, Herodotus, Arabian Nights. And all the collections of myths I could find. Very European centred, I admit - I completely missed the Bhagavad Gita & Koran & Mahabharatta & all that. Though I did have some Australian & New Zealand native legendary tales.

deadman_932

Exceedingly. I was thinking about that earlier, when I first posted: about how the Qu'ran and Bible differ so much from the fun of reading Greek, Norse, Slavic myths, the Mabinogion, Amerind stuff, etc.

There's something about Middle Eastern material that's just BORING to me.

Edit: I should qualify this by saying the Sumerian, Egyptian, later Persian stuff isn't that bad, or at least what I've read of it, but on the whole, it's a region that doesn't interest me on a personal level.

Mat Wilder

I agree. It is very boring. I guess the Jews just weren't a jolly folk. The Greeks, now. There was a culture who knew how to party. Love me some bacchanalias!