Will I love The Odyssey?

Once, on a weeks-long gig far from home, I stayed in a bare attic room with no TV, no internet, not even a radio. I didn’t mind. I had this translation of the Odyssey to settle down with every evening after work. I would think about it all day long: the vivid language, the fantastical events, the struggle and suffering of the protagonist. Reading it was like going to a technicolor movie every night, except that the movie was inside my head.

Talk about an essential human story—the Odyssey is four thousand years old, but its characters have the same… show more.

Isn’t this your journey? Home receding farther away the harder you reach after it? I can read this book repeatedly and never feel tired, like I’m covering well-worn ground. How is that? I start the book, and before I know it, I am on the waters, in the cave, longing for home. Aren’t we all? I love it for its language (translated, alas).

Robert Fitzgerald was a great start! But I recently fell in love with Robert Fagle's more American-style version: “The sun sank, the roads of the world grew dark.” At the end of the world, it’s good to… show more.

Because it is a great read, Homer’s novel-like Odyssey is one of the best-loved books from antiquity. Moreover, it illustrates Greek mythology in action. 

Homer’s epic tells of the difficult return of the hero Odysseus from distant Troy to his island-home of Ithaca following the Trojan War, as he seeks to be reunited with his wife Penelope. In the course of his travels, he is aided by the goddess Athena, who is his divine champion, but obstructed by the wrathful sea-god Poseidon, his persecutor. 

Among other obstacles are bizarre and memorable characters such as the one-eyed, cannibalistic Cyclops, the treacherous… show more.