halberdbooks 's review for:

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

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To review a book like this from my perspective seems pretty silly. I had many reasons to read this: to prepare for grad school one day, to ready myself for reading The Silmarillion, to gain a better appreciation for my favorite video game series, to further understand what makes a person become a legend, and to have a richer understanding of intertextuality. Certainly, I didn't read this book to agree with the concept of the Monomyth: the books assertion that all myths tell the same story. I also didn't read this book to be convinced on the truth of psychoanalytic theory, its foundational method of understanding stories. Luckily, the book didn't try to convince me of any of those things. It confidently stated its points and moved on, often without elaborating on or arguing its own truth. And I respect that. But it does make it hard to follow as a nonacademic more than 70 years later. That said, what I did follow, I enjoyed. And I took it all with a hefty grain of salt. I'm not convinced that this is the final method of interpreting myth. Luckily, the book itself explictly states that such a thing will never come to be. I feel enriched for having read it. I feel exhausted for having read it. I'm not giving this a star rating, because that would be such a silly and useless thing to give it.