Here are 98 books that The Odyssey fans have personally recommended if you like
The Odyssey.
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I am a survivor. Whether flaming engines on a plane, a hurricane, or breast cancer, I have made many unusual journeys. The way I see it, I am also a writer, and God keeps giving me material for my adventure novels. Of course, I’m also a reader and could fill this page with more than five recommendations. Hopefully, you’ll want to read one of these awesome books. I guarantee they will make you escape reality.
This book is a perfect story. It has a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying ending. I love it because I’m guilty of overthinking many things.
I also love books that take you on a journey. As an armchair traveler, the best adventures make me leave my chair, taking me somewhere far away, at least until dinner.
A global phenomenon, The Alchemist has been read and loved by over 62 million readers, topping bestseller lists in 74 countries worldwide. Now this magical fable is beautifully repackaged in an edition that lovers of Paulo Coelho will want to treasure forever.
Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. This is such a book - a beautiful parable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life's path and, above all, follow your dreams.
Santiago, a young shepherd living in the hills of Andalucia, feels that there is…
I heard a Jordan Peterson interview in which he boiled down my entire life’s struggle in a single phrase. The interviewer was pushing Jordon on the subject of male toxicity. Jordon said something like, “If a man is entirely unwilling to fight under any circumstance, he is merely a weakling. Ask in martial arts trainer and they will tell you they teach two things – the ability to fight and self-control. A man who knows how and also knows how to control himself is a man.”
James Clavell’s first book, King Rat, is the story of allied servicemen trapped by the Japanese in Singapore at the beginning of World War II and held captive for the duration in the infamous Changi prison. The captured consisted of some 10,000 men made up of a British regiment, a few Australian companies, and one small American platoon. After three years of brutal, virtually starvation conditions even the British Commanding General was reduced to a uniform of nothing more than rags. Only one prisoner, an American Corporal, had lost no weight, wore a freshly pressed uniform and spit-shined shoes every day. With physical courage and an understanding of human weaknesses and breaking points he dominated all the other prisoners and many of the guards as well. When the camp was liberated he was the only man among the survivors who left without one friend. Why? The key to both his…
Set in Changi, the most notorious prisoner of war camp in Asia, King Rat is an heroic story of survival told by a master story-teller who lived through those years as a young soldier. Only one man in fifteen had the strength, the luck, and the cleverness simply to survive Changi. And then there was King.
I love history, and it infuses most of my fiction. Since I first picked up a book, I’ve never stopped learning about the past. Now, I listen to college courses and podcasts and read books both popular and academic. Sometimes this is for my writing or personal travel, but those things are often just excuses for the fun of immersion in a subject. I particularly enjoy reading and writing alternate/secret history because it merges creative imagination with factual scholarship. But I’m picky about the use of history in all media—factual sloppiness bumps me out of a story as quickly as bad physics drives a scientist from an SF movie.
After I quit my law firm and was trying to decide what (if anything) I wanted to write, I read Kushiel’s Dart. This book convinced me that whatever stories I wanted to tell, no matter how extreme, I could tell them within science fiction/fantasy. And it really puts the “alternate” in alternate history.
During the Roman Empire, angels came to earth and mated with mortals in the area of modern France, again producing a race like the biblical Nephilim, only sexier, and with one commandment: “Love as thou wilt.” In this Europe that never knew a dark age, the angels’ descendants pursue love, power, and intrigue, and at the center of their plots is Phèdre, a courtesan spy fighting to save her land from betrayal.
The lush epic fantasy that inspired a generation with a single precept: Love As Thou Wilt
The first book in the Kushiel's Legacy series is a novel of grandeur, luxuriance, sacrifice, betrayal, and deeply laid conspiracies. A world of cunning poets, deadly courtiers, deposed rulers and a besieged Queen, a warrior-priest, the Prince of Travelers, barbarian warlords, heroic traitors, and a truly Machiavellian villainess...all seen through the unflinching eyes of an unforgettable heroine.
A nation born of angels, vast and intricate and surrounded by danger... a woman born to servitude, unknowingly given access to the secrets of the realm...
I heard a Jordan Peterson interview in which he boiled down my entire life’s struggle in a single phrase. The interviewer was pushing Jordon on the subject of male toxicity. Jordon said something like, “If a man is entirely unwilling to fight under any circumstance, he is merely a weakling. Ask in martial arts trainer and they will tell you they teach two things – the ability to fight and self-control. A man who knows how and also knows how to control himself is a man.”
As a teenager Alexander, to become The Great, is given to one of his father’s warriors – Telamon – to go on a life-threatening winter wolf hunt. A risk of building character and spirit his father is willing to take. Later in life, during Alexander’s conquest, Telemon never wishes to rise above a colonel’s rank. He wants to remain in the midst of the fighting.
When Alexander finally departs India to end his conquests Telamon leaves him to go off with a group of monks. When Alexander asks why that choice Telamon responds, “I schooled you as a boy Alexander, to be superior to fear and anger. You vanquished hardship and hunger and cold and fatigue. But you have not learned to master your victories. These hold you. You are their slave.” What more can a man learn from a book?
As for my liking this book, Pressfield is one of my favorite authors and this…
I have always been a soldier. I have known no other life. So begins Alexander’s extraordinary confession on the eve of his greatest crisis of leadership. By turns heroic and calculating, compassionate and utterly merciless, Alexander recounts with a warrior’s unflinching eye for detail the blood, the terror, and the tactics of his greatest battlefield victories. Whether surviving his father’s brutal assassination, presiding over a massacre, or weeping at the death of a beloved comrade-in-arms, Alexander never denies the hard realities of the code by which he lives: the virtues of war. But as much as he was feared by…
I heard a Jordan Peterson interview in which he boiled down my entire life’s struggle in a single phrase. The interviewer was pushing Jordon on the subject of male toxicity. Jordon said something like, “If a man is entirely unwilling to fight under any circumstance, he is merely a weakling. Ask in martial arts trainer and they will tell you they teach two things – the ability to fight and self-control. A man who knows how and also knows how to control himself is a man.”
James Jones's brilliant debut novel must have had a great effect on me because I admit, in many ways, my book covers the same ground – how does a man maintain honor and dignity when constrained to live his life by the choices of other, and much more powerful men? I suppose the difference between our two themes is that the question in my book is about those same choices but wrapped in the question of race. Jones’s characters, while in the military, were dealing with personal issues. My Corporal Buck is dealing with an issue about which all of America is on fire.
From Here to Eternity is 70 years old. I read it in 1969, an eternity ago and it has lasted with me from there to here. When I was in the Marine Corps I knew everything that was happening to me. But I didn’t know what…
Prew won't conform. He could have been the best boxer and the best bugler in his division, but he chooses the life of a straight soldier in Hawaii under the fierce tutelage of Sergeant Milt Warden. When he refuses to box for his company for mysterious reasons, he is given 'The Treatment', a relentless campaign of physical and mental abuse. Meanwhile, Warden wages his own campaign against authority by seducing the Captain's wife Karen - just because he can. Both men are bound to the Army, even though it may destroy them.
I was a wild card in the industry heavy town where I was born and raised, destined to burn out my days early in a factory or steel mill. But I worked my way through college, survived several close calls in Vietnam and bull headed my way into a series of jobs that pushed me toward Hollywood assignments as a writer, producer and director.
I liked this book because of its unique plot. After the American Civil War, ex-trooper and sharp shooter Valdez is working as a part-time small town sheriff. He gets on the bad side of a wealthy rancher who has a gang beat him up and leave him for dead out in the desert.
But after this excellent opening, I love what happens next. Valdez is a survivor: he returns to face off against incredible odds, to regain his honor and see that justice prevails.
No writer chronicles the battles of misfits, underdogs and renegades like Elmore Leonard ...
VALDEZ IS COMING is a stunning stale of morality and justice in which a simple, honest man is transformed into a killer - and begins a long journey of revenge against those who scarred his soul for ever.
Elmore Leonard's Western novels stand as some of the most vivid writing of his career. With all of his trademark sharp dialogue and set against a beautifully evoked landscape, this is a classic work that captures the wild and glorious spirit of the American West.
I have a passion for the topic because it’s so unlimited. We’re all called to destiny inner/outer in so many ways. We see a lot of stories about those calls being massive adventures with global impact—but sometimes the small stories, those inner calls with inner love answers are just as epic, just as magnificent. Love of family, community, country, lovers, nature… truly, it can be anything. These are just a few books off the older shelves to illustrate the many ways love answers the call. My challenge is to go back and re-read them with this list in mind. Re-visit books from a decade ago, reframe the story with love.
I never miss an opportunity to recommend this book for its broad scope and human courage.
It’s such an immersive and very human story full of adventure, challenge, will, and passion. Auriane is brought to such exquisite life as a woman born to a destiny meant to free the people she loves.
This book lands on my list for a call to destiny answered by love because Auriane’s life is an example of how we can’t see ourselves, or how we often don’t know where to fit, whom to challenge, and where to connect—but we find our way by being relentlessly devoted to doing what feels right to us, guided by that internal flame until we unite with the force that gives us a purpose, place, meaning.
Often, if not always, that destiny is deeply anchored in love.
For Auriane, that love is her tribe, and her community, family, friends,…
Auriane, daughter of a Rhine River area chieftain in 50 A.D., must face her difficult destiny and lead her people against the invading legions of the Roman Empire
I have a passion for the topic because it’s so unlimited. We’re all called to destiny inner/outer in so many ways. We see a lot of stories about those calls being massive adventures with global impact—but sometimes the small stories, those inner calls with inner love answers are just as epic, just as magnificent. Love of family, community, country, lovers, nature… truly, it can be anything. These are just a few books off the older shelves to illustrate the many ways love answers the call. My challenge is to go back and re-read them with this list in mind. Re-visit books from a decade ago, reframe the story with love.
This one might seem an odd pick at first. I thought so too when a friend gave me a copy. I was surprised there was an Anne McCaffery book I hadn’t read!
This book belongs on the list for its beautiful depiction of what love and community can do for a group of mismatched outcasts, refugees on a dangerous planet—a collection of peoples all very different from one another working together to survive.
Their destiny was to become a cohesive extended family despite all their differences, and to become empowered individuals at the same time. There’s a steamy romance, too. So that’s always yummy. It goes to show that when destiny calls, the love that answers can be with a voice of multitudes.
Let Anne McCaffrey, storyteller extraordinare and New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author, open your mind to new worlds and new concepts. Worlds where humans are the slaves of aliens and love can flourish in the most unlikely of places... Perfect for fans of David Eddings, Brandon Sanderson and Douglas Adams.
'Anne McCaffrey, one of the queens of science fiction, knows exactly how to give her public what it wants' - THE TIMES 'My go to comfort book' -- ***** Reader review 'Anne McCaffrey at her best' -- ***** Reader review 'Unputdownable' -- ***** Reader review 'I love this…
My interest in the heroes and myths of the Trojan War came from a dream. My father was a wounded Greek youth and I carried him down into the Underworld. As I explored that dream and my relationship to my father, the world of Greek mythology opened to me. I absorbed The Iliad and The Odyssey, read the fragments and summaries of the other six poems that in antiquity had been part of the Epic or Trojan Cycle, immersed myself in Greek myths and gods, wondered if Homer wrote both surviving epics (I don’t think he did), and found within myself the voice of Telemachus ready to narrate On Wine-Dark Seas.
The author, a professor of classics at Bard College, invites his father to attend his class on The Odyssey. What unfolds is a marvelous father-son story as his opinionated father vigorously participates and the author limns his complicated relationship to this endearing and perplexing man. All this is set against insightful discussions of The Odyssey and the father-son relationship of Odysseus and Telemachus. A surprising and very pleasurable read.
From award-winning memoirist and critic, and bestselling author of The Lost: a deeply moving tale of a father and son's transformative journey in reading--and reliving--Homer's epic masterpiece.
When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his "one last chance" to learn the great literature he'd neglected in…
I’m a professor at Cambridge University, and following years of training in ancient languages and linguistics, I am currently running a research project on the visual aspects of writing systems. Recently, I’ve become passionate about using research on ancient languages and writing to try to help communities today who are in danger of losing their linguistic traditions (I've started an Endangered Writing Network)–which is why the fragility of human culture is high on my agenda. Ultimately, I’d like the world to be a better place for my baby son to grow up in, and I hope to use my academic work to help people in some small way.
This story has always struck me as a quest to identify and regain humanity, as its hero repeatedly faces strange and powerful obstacles to his voyage home. I first read it as a child and then again, but in Greek, as a student—a time in life when anyone is trying to find their feet as a human being!
Perhaps the most comforting thing is that amongst all the gods and monsters and cursing and fighting, eating habits often characterize the work’s characters. Odysseus is always looking for sitophagoi, bread eaters, i.e. civilized people who make their own food, rather than man-eating monsters. I can identify with a hero looking for nice people to share a nice meal with.
The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage, family and identity; and about travellers, hospitality and the changing meanings of home in a strange world.
This vivid new translation-the first by a woman-matches the number of lines in the Greek original, striding at Homer's sprightly pace. Emily Wilson employs elemental, resonant language and an iambic pentameter to produce a translation with an enchanting "rhythm and rumble" that avoids proclaiming its own grandeur. An engrossing tale told in a compelling new…