Reading Homer

READING HOMER - A Journey Through The Iliad and The Odyssey

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are the oldest, most widely read, and most consistently influential works in the Western literary tradition. They are also, for many readers, the works they most wish they had read and have never quite managed to, too long, too ancient, too surrounded by the armour of cultural prestige to approach as what they actually are: two of the most emotionally immediate, morally serious, and simply alive works of literature ever composed.

Reading Homer: A Journey Through the Iliad and the Odyssey is the companion that makes the journey possible. Moving through both poems chapter by chapter, from the opening word of rage to the last line of Hector's funeral, from Telemachus sitting apart in his invaded household to the olive-tree bed at the heart of the reunion, it guides readers through the narrative, the characters, and the ideas, with close attention to the passages that reward the deepest reading and clear, honest explanation of what the poems are doing and why it still matters.

This is not a book about Homer's historical context, or the archaeology of the Bronze Age, or the metrics of hexameter verse. It is a book about what it feels like to read Homer and what to pay attention to in order to feel it fully. It covers the rage of Achilles and the grief of Andromache; the cunning of Odysseus and the patience of Penelope; the comedy of the gods on Olympus and the terror of the gods in battle; the Named Dead who accumulate across the Iliad's pages like a war memorial in verse; the ache of nostalgia in its original and most precise sense, not a comfortable longing for the past, but the sharp, clarifying pain of a man who knows exactly where he belongs and is fighting everything the world can assemble to get back there.

The poems have been waiting three thousand years. They are not going anywhere. But the right moment to begin is always now, and this book, lucid, direct, unintimidated by its subject, shows exactly how.

The essential companion for anyone who has ever wanted to read Homer and everyone who thought they couldn't.