ITT: Books that you enjoyed, but didn't really 'get it'. You still understood what you were reading, but never made that mental click where everything starts making sense on a deeper level.
I think the age gap on this one was too big for it to really click in my head, but it was still a very cool read.
I genuinely think Homer's works are the ancient equivalent of superhero movies. They're not deep. They're just fun. Ancient Greece fetishists project way more onto his works than is actually there.
Tons of em OP. I read lots of classics when i was too young but still enjoyed them. Its almost like porn to read some writers when youre young. Hyper adult worlds and all.
>something fun cannot be deep
>something deep cannot be fun
The whole scene of Priam's plea to Achilles is an example of how the Iliad is, among other things, a moving, beautiful poem. Read more and develop poetic sensibility.
>>something fun cannot be deep
>>something deep cannot be fun
I neither said nor implied either of these things.
It's meant to be performed rather than read. It's goal is to stir the emotions of an audience, but modern readers, who tend to be solitary and intellectual, aren't so vulnerable to its manipulations.
What is with the terrible book cover
I sort of feel this way about David Foster Wallace. I enjoy his sense of humour and it's clear he's a very intelligent writer with a knack for analytical detail that's genuinely verging on autistic (not meaning to use it as a pejorative, it genuinely feels like his writing is similar to how autistic people/people with asperger's seem to organise/think), but I couldn't ever really "click" much with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I want to read Infinite Jest sometime but I feel that, for a book that size, if I'm not "clicking" with his prose style in his shorter works, I'm going to really struggle with his largest.
>It's goal is to stir the emotions of an audience, but modern readers, who tend to be solitary and intellectual, aren't so vulnerable to its manipulations.
I agree. I think this is about all that you could possibly miss while reading The Odyssey. If you read an intro essay that comes in every edition by anybody, you can get the idea that the events are meant to be dramatic and romantic in ways that are a little more single-entendre than would dare appear in contemporary drama.
I think it took me some time and thinking, maybe some maturing, to understand the ways that paranoia and belief that drive books like From Hell or The Crying of Lot 49. Like, I might have read those and understood the plot but I don't think I was ever so susceptible to the fact that buying into an idea, no matter how initially crazy or irrational it seems at first, gives that idea so much power (in the case of From Hell, magic. In the case of TCoL49, order and dark plots).
>not crying when Hector says goodbye to Andromache and Astyanax
The fuck's with that cover. Moon plus Trajan. Absolutely pathetic.
The Lombardo covers all have images which are supposed to be modern analogues of the stories iirc.
Ah that makes sense.
Is that Donald Trump?
I read the entire Old Testament and didn't get a damn thing out of it. The only benefit I have is catching the occasional literary reference, but most references are to the New Testament, Genesis, Exodus, or Ecclesiastes, so I could have saved myself months of study
what about oblivion my man
Reading the Bible can be very laborious and I certainly forgot a lot what I read about in the Old Testament, however, by only reading the source material you can actually not get a lot out of the source material. It does give you a certain window into a previous society/cult like structures. A close reading of the text within its cultural context can be quite interesting and you will find out about how a tribe became to be a monarchy and different kind of processes going on within the OT. I'd recommend watching these oyc.yale.edu
On the Iliad: What is there not to get? Its about the negative sides of going to war i.e. getting cucked and then murdered by your wife and her bull. Its a guide for ancient Greeks for how to behave and gives you an interesting picture of how Greek society was or how it was being portrayed in ancient times.
I had the benefit of reading this whilst being taught it back when I studied classics OP, and I completely feel that it made me able to understand and appreciate the themes of it much clearly that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise
Investing in a study guide for it is honestly very worth it, the depth you can get out of it is incredible if you understand the cultural context better
I've been listening to the Great Teaching Courses audio files on the Iliad and it was quite informative. Also I actually meant the Odyssey in my original post I'll probably also look for a link for this thegreatcourses.com
i'm too dumb for postmodern literature but i like some of it sometimes ;_;
Did you buy the audio files?
if u dudes do buy teaching company courses get them from audible, its way cheaper, in many cases you can get any of them for $15 (one audible credit) they also have "the modern scholar" series which is like tgc, but with different intro music lol they even have a harold bloom one on shakespeare
This opinion and its opposite equivalent are the culmination of thousands of years of societal failure
>buy
nah, I was hoping he had a download link to be honest
i pirated the shit out of those for years and i still have scores of them on one of my hard drives, but these days i buy them too, not all of them make it to torrents, and when they do it usually takes weeks or months, there are some huge packs of them on demonoid, but they're all the old ones probably up to 2012 or so, which is a plenty to get you started, but if you wanted the newest obscurest dank shit, might as well cough up a couple bucks to support the literature courses, because the christianity and self-improvement themed ones sell the best, and so they make those more, so if you want to see more sick lit shit, vote with your wallet
what is the best translation for the Iliad and the Odyssey
Fitzgerald
...
>>
seconding oblivion. way better than brief interviews
Pope or go home.
....FITZGERALD.
I'll hide at home will reading the Everyman edition then I'll burn it so people won't judge me for being a pleb.
That's the best I can do buddy