The Jane Austen Book Club.

Oooh, that's a great example (although I didn't like that particular book).

And I know one person in the salon who would probably love the Mary Russell books (which I've been meaning to try myself).

I love Atwood's Penelopiad, but that's in part because I've taught the original Odyssey so many times that I get all of her references and find them endlessly entertaining.

There's probably a whole other pile based on The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aenead. And retellings of Medea.

Found an interesting link: [link]

Thanks! Lots of good ideas there. Bridget Jones Diary is perhaps stretching it a bit, but a few of those seem exactly the type of thing I'm looking for.

[link]

Dana, one of my students gave me Gertrude and Claudius for Christmas this year. I really need to read it.

The Song of Achilles was one of my favorite books last year and I totally forgot about it.

Jane Eyre/Wide Sargasso Sea and Dr. Jeckyll.../Mary Reilly would be examples of ones more in the fan fiction vein, but I'm also thinking about books where a particular classic is a big plot point.

Updike wrote one based on Scarlet Letter titled, I think "S."

Ahab's Wife.

Foe by J.M. Coetzee - Robinson Crusoe told from the POV of Friday.

There are a bunch more but those are the ones I remember off the top of my had after Wide Sargasso Sea.

Achilles in Vietnam is non-fiction, but is tied to The Iliad.

The first 3 Mary Russell books are definitely the best.

But I sure didn't see the assault-y part coming. At all. Kind of shook me up.

This is also exactly how I feel.

It's just -- I didn't expect the format of the entire book to be the way it was, with the flashbacks to Julia's magic training (for want of a better term), but I *loved* her backstory. LOVED. Right up to the OMGWHATISHAPPENING part. (And -- I was never quite sure about this -- was it anal, or just rear entry? I mean, sure, rape is rape, particularly by a mean trickster god, so I'm not at all trying to split hairs to say one is less horrific than the other. Mostly, I couldn't tell from the text what was what, and wondered how other people read it.

Tep, I'm still leery. I was a bit put off by the gender relationships in the first book, so I think I'm going to keep away from the 2nd.

The weird thing for me is that I *wanted* to love the first book, and found it fairly pretentious and lacking substance. So I didn't expect to like the second, and wouldn't have read it, but we were on vacation with Tim's family, and his college senior-aged niece (who is a nerdy Buffista spirit baby, and whose opinion I trust) had it with her and loved it, so I borrowed it. (Plus, I had The Night Circus with me, and she ganked it from me before I could even start it, so I figured I might as well read her book.)