8 Answers2026-04-08
I just had a thought about the fans of epic stories (e.g. The Odyssey). They would probably consider Ulysses by James Joyce to be very high-brow, experimental fanfiction. It is a transformative work that takes the original story and reworks it into a completely new work, with new characters and setting. However, the characters in the new story have similar motivations to the characters in the original work. Rather than dealing with the longings for home, etc. of ancient travelers, however, Joyce dealt with the anxiety of returning home in the early 20th century. It is the ultimate example of a story that gets retold and reworked over and over in different cultures and time periods. Joyce’s version is of course, of a particularly high literary ambition and thus is considered part of the ‘canon’ for a century.
7 Answers2026-04-08
This comparison is to writer like the high jump to athlete. In setting the high bar of the epic tale of kingdoms and heroes, the Greek Homer set a standard that the Irish writer James Joyce aimed to exceed in his modernist masterpiece. By tackling the ‘epic of the ordinary man’ and shaping it into the modest narrative of a single day, the writer succeeded in reframing the epic form in a radically innovative manner. By faithfully mirroring the Odyssey’s structure and montage of leitmotifs, i.e. recurring motifs and situations in episodes, the writer unfolds a symbolic journey that follows a modern-day hero. By applying the symbolic journey of the hero to the humblest of subjects – and embedding it in the most mundane of materials – the writer of this masterpiece is making a point: the classic tools of the epic are meant to be used on the most everyday of subjects, in order to uncover a universe in every life of them, be it ever so ordinary.
8 Answers2025-08-02
While The Iliad is the longer of the two poems and thus the real monster, The Odyssey is the sequel and is actually a more compact, focused work that follows the single journey of a hero to return home to his family. Assuming a dedicated reader, it is possible to read The Odyssey in two weeks or so. The short chapters move at a brisk pace with lots of action. Yes, there are occasional lulls in the narrative, but these are filled out with lots of interesting detail about the world of the poem as well as further development of individual characters. Penelope’s pause in weaving and her subsequent unwinding of the shroud is a suspenseful masterclass even in lack of action. No one should therefore be afraid of The Odyssey because of its reputation as the Greatest Epic. It is a foundation story of Adventure. Read it. It is short. Get a good translation and devour it within a couple of weeks – you will be surprised by how quickly the pages pass.
8 Answers2026-07-29
Scholars believe that The Odyssey was passed down orally through generations of storytellers before it was ever written down as a book. There are many, many differences between different versions of the book, and most of them come from translations and from different editorial choices that were made over the centuries. Some translators have wanted to preserve the poetic style of the book and have written in verse—Fagles did a wonderful verse translation of The Odyssey many years ago. Recently there have been many more modern translations—and one of the interesting things about them is that they have also been able to strip away many centuries of patriarchal bias. There are abridged versions of the book for children, graphic novel versions, and even novels that follow the stories of secondary characters. The book itself is not changing, but our way of reading the book is very different depending on the version we read.
Check out the opening of a few different translations online. You will very quickly get the translator’s voice.
9 Answers2025-08-20
I just thought I’d ask if anyone else found these as sort of bored in high school. I know lots of people seem to like them and consider them some of the best novels of all time. I just never got it. Maybe I was just too young. Maybe my teacher didn’t do it justice. I’ve been thinking about reading them again as an adult, but the bad memories of the novels in high school are sort of putting me off. Are the audiobooks so much better than I’d hear in class? Maybe I’d actually like them.
7 Answers2025-08-20
Reading both Iliad and Odyssey back to back is emotionally jarring, a contrast between a relentless, brutal war film tracking glory and suffering and a fantastical, sometimes mischievous, sometimes hopeful road trip around a chaotic, supernatural world and its man. As for length, there’s room for the emotional reset required between the end of Iliad’s funerals, culminating in Hector’s tragic funeral and our first experience of pity, and the beginning of Odyssey’s long journey home. As for the two epics being read together, the combined length is not just a matter of numbers of pages, it’s also a time buffer between two episodes of such vastly different moods and tones, a time to draw and dwell on the tragedy of the first of the two great epics before getting on to the second. Reading them quickly one after the other would be to do them a disservice, each demands a separate space, and the physical bulk of the two books on a shelf is just sufficient to enforce that needed space.
11 Answers2025-07-08
Has anyone noticed the element of “nostos” or “homecoming” in films? Like in the “Odyssey” where all the characters search for home in different ways. Searchers is a western about an old veteran searching for his niece, but in the end he cannot return home. Finding Nemo is a story about a father searching for his son all over the ocean. It’s a nostos story for kids too.
The ‘Iliad’ is about ‘kleos’ or glory. Films such as ‘Platoon’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket’ look at the ‘glory’ of war through the eyes of young men searching for it, hoping to find it or to even survive. So rather than watch all of the movies about the actual Trojan War, you can look at films that are thematic cousins to ‘The Iliad’. The setting of Troy is not really that important in the poems of Homer. The specific stories he wrote about expressed a deeper human experience than just a couple of specific wars.
3 Answers2025-07-06
Read them in parallel! Find a good companion guide or podcast that is book-by-book. So you read a book of The Iliad and then listen to some discussion on it, and then you read a book of The Odyssey, and then you read a book of The Iliad, and so on. It’s very interesting to compare and contrast the two epics as you read them. Of course, reading the two epics in parallel will take twice as long as reading them one after the other, but the additional insight you get into how Homer treats topics like heroism, family, and the gods in each of the two epics is well worth the additional time. And the additional time is not comparing two books of similar length but rather experiencing two epics of greatly different length intertwined in such a way to produce a longer and far more rewarding reading experience.
8 Answers2025-07-16
'The Odyssey' is one of my favorites. The original hardcover version I own, published by Penguin Classics, has around 384 pages. It's a bit dense, but the translation by Robert Fagles makes it incredibly readable. The page count can vary depending on the publisher and the size of the text, but most hardcover editions hover between 350 and 400 pages. If you're looking for a specific edition, I'd recommend checking the ISBN or the publisher's website for exact details. The beauty of 'The Odyssey' is that even though it's ancient, it feels timeless, and the hardcover versions often include helpful notes and maps.
6 Answers2026-01-26
Borrow from your friends! I have a group of people that read just as much as I do and we trade books all the time. I got to borrow the physical copy of The Heroes of Olympus from a friend who had the whole box set of each series. We even had a little book club where we all passed around each book as we finished them, one by one. It’s free to borrow from your friends, and adds to the experience. Look for local Little Free Libraries in your neighborhood if your friends aren’t into reading as much as you are. You may find a copy of The Mark of Athena or other books in the series at one of these. The rule for Little Free Libraries is to take a book and leave a book, so it continues to build a community of readers. It’s more an analog way of finding a book to read than a digital download, but you get the same end result and it’s connected to other people of the same genre in your area. The journey to finding the book can be just as fun as reading the book itself.