The Big O
Hot Greek Summer is real, and it is spectacular.
Even when I am decidedly cold on a movie, as I was with Wuthering Heights, I’m always happy to see a literary adaptation steal the media spotlight. (Okay, “always” might be overkill because I have taken a few for the team in my time, and I’m still mad about the hours I lost to It Ends With Us in both book and movie form, but YKWIM.)
It’s fun to see a movie get people excited about reading—especially when there’s a new op-ed every other week declaring that books are really and truly no-joking-this-time dead—but what really fires me up is thinking about the experience people are going to have when they pick up a big and possibly intimidating book they wouldn’t have tried before.
The Odyssey has a lot of things working against it with modern readers. It’s long. It’s written in verse (who even knows what dactylic hexameter is?). Many of the translations use hifalutin Elizabethan-sounding language that only raises the barrier to entry. Its reputation precedes it in every possible way, and the popular cultural representations of it are grounded in big set pieces (Circe, the sirens, the Cyclops, etc) that actually take up a minimal amount of space in the book.
If you can overcome all of The Odyssey’s aura, you are in for a treat. First, there’s the reading itself, which will likely be easier—definitely easier than Shakespeare!—and more enjoyable than you’ve been imagining. Then there’s the payoff: once you have read The Odyssey, you know you can The Odyssey. And if you can take on the book that is arguably the cornerstone in the foundation of Western literature, what can’t you try?
The cure for readerly impostor syndrome runs straight through this kind of book, and I just love the possibilities that opens up. It’s too soon to know if Christopher Nolan and crew will propel Homer to the bestseller list, but more than 200 people joined our guided read-along of The Odyssey alone. (The materials are still available if you’ve got FOMO.) And that’s just one data point!
If you’re thinking at all about cracking The Odyssey, if you’ve been holding off because of some vague fear that you won’t get it, I hope you’ll give yourself the chance to find out that you’re wrong.