Odyssey

This month’s book club selection was Homer’s Odyssey. I read selections or maybe the whole thing in the later years in grade school and all of it in college when I took Greek Lit in translation. The best experience was Greek Lit. My professor was engaging and enthused, which was infectious.

This time my interest waxed and waned. The beginning seemed slow and I had a hard time getting into this classic as I just wanted to follow Odysseus and move beyond the scene back in Ithaca with the boorish suitors chowing down and drinking up at the hero’s expense and eyeing the hero’s elegant wife Penelope. As I read I was impatient to get to the familiar scenes with the Cyclops and the land of the Lotos Eaters. Then I found those parts came earlier than expected and ended too soon.

I loved some of the poetry, the lines about the red fingers of the dawn, but I had trouble enjoying the epic. I was out of sync as I read it. Some of the best adventures like the episode with the Cyclops flew by and others like the beginning with the suitors and Penelope dragged.

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• Torn from Troy: The Odyssey of a Slave (2011), by Patrick Bowman (karynskidlitreviews.wordpress.com)
• Book Discussion: The Odyssey by Homer (alleganylibrarycollections.wordpress.com)
• “Cat’s Funeral” and Homer’s “wine-dark sea” (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)