Do you still have room on your reading list?

Labrys, the Hellenic Polytheistic group located in Greece who recently performed the Phallephoria, have started another initiative to aid the Hellenistic community: a reading list on LibraryThings. The Labrys Religious Community aims to preserve, promote and practice the Hellenic polytheistic religious tradition through public rituals, lectures, publications, theatrical and musical events, and other forms of action. Their vision is to restore the Hellenic religious tradition and by extension the Hellenic Kosmotheasis and lifestyle to its rightful place, as a respected, acknowledged and fully functional spiritual path.

The focus of the booklist is on modern books and papers, dealing with the ancient Hellenic people, ancient Hellenic mythology, or modern Hellenism. The list is made up of modern works, so you won't find Plato on the list. Well-represented, however, are authors like Walter Burkert, Drew Campbell, Robert Graves, Sarah Iles Johnston, Carl Kerenyi, Julia Kindt, Jon D. Mikalson, and many, many, others. To date, the list contains 236 books by a large variety of authors.

LibraryThings allows you to browse by book or authors, add books to your own library to give an indication of how many people own it, and perhaps most importantly, LibraryThings allows the user to leave a review of the book in question. I feel this is one of most important aspects fo this reading list, as it will help those new or searching in determining if the book will be of value to them. I thus encourage everyone to leave reviews of the books they have read, wether you have found them valuable or not.

As I am fortunate enough to have access to a good portion of the books on this list, I plan to leave reviews in the coming weeks. I will also go through it to find some of the pearls I might have missed. I greatly applaud this Labrys initiative and hope it finds traction with many Hellenists around the world. As a reminder: if you are looking for an alternative list that also includes ancient titles, Baring the Aegis has its own reading list as well. Enjoy the read!

Image source: here.