100 books like The Parliament of Poets

Long after I began studying Italian, I resisted reading Italy’s greatest poet. His classic book seemed too daunting, too distant, too dull. Then, an Italian teacher gave me the first adaptation of the La Divina Commedia that she had read as a girl: a vintage Italian Walt Disney comic book featuring Mickey Mouse (Topolino in Italian) as Dante with Minnie Mouse as his adored Beatrice.   

I was so intrigued that I bought an English translation of the Divine Comedy—several, although I’m partial to John Ciardi’s. My unanticipated reaction: Wow! Like modern readers ensnared by the wizardly world of Harry Potter, I skidded into a fully imagined alternate world. An action-packed, high-adrenalin, breath-taking, rip-roaring yarn leaped off the pages into vivid, writhing, pulsating life. If you love action-packed tales and also seek insights into the Italian soul, read The Inferno. Purgatorio and Paradiso are optional. 

If you are fed up with the mundane, the triviality of everyday life, and if you want to experience the sublime – writing that is sublime, that lifts you up to see imaginary and heroic worlds where the invisible forces that underpin reality battle for supremacy, then this is the poem for you. True, its language can seem difficult, but so can Shakespeare’s; instead of thinking that’s a problem, embrace it – let the language work its magic and soar to the stars and back! I have loved this poem ever since I read it when I was twenty, and quote it all the time. It will inspire the warrior in you.

From two great past epic classics, I now move to the contemporary present: Benson Brown’s is a mock epic a la Byron (think, Don Juan). Brilliantly funny, witty, exposing the American War of Independence in ways you have never seen before – a laugh-out-loud poem, and full of rich historical details as well as mythological conceits which makes it a unique reading experience. Weirdly, for all its parody, I probably learnt more about the American War from it than from actual historical texts. The back page blurb says: "Thomas Jefferson is sent to Hell for a mysterious sin." Find out what – get the poem!

Sometimes one has to come clean: does nepotism rule? It’s true: Joseph Sale is my son, a successful horror and fantasy novelist. But here he has taken Edmund Spenser’s C16th masterpiece, The Faerie Queen, which was unfinished, and completed it using a different stanzaic form. I’d like to recommend The Faerie Queen itself, but it is too dense and archaic. Joseph’s sequel, by way of contrast, is modern, fast-paced, action-packed, thrilling, and imaginative in the highest order. To see what the heroic is like (and bring out the warrior in you) read Book 6 and Canto 5: the epic descent of Thoth into hell – a match for Gandalf and the Balrog in writing style and power. 

This may be considered an odd choice on the surface, given the true events of the Trojan War. This was also another I initially struggled with. Nevertheless, despite the factual elements, it’s viewed as one of the earliest epic fantasies in Western literature, along with The Odyssey, which came after.

Centered on just a few days of the ten-year siege of Troy, the lives of humans and their gods are intricately linked. It is one of the earliest examples of pathos with much sympathy actually lying with the enemies, the Trojans, a people based in Asia Minor, and their allies from all over the region. Outside the gods, it also references monsters such as Bellerophon, the Gorgon, and centaurs, with the gods often used as a plot device to refract the emotions and flaws of the characters.

The world-building is vivid and rich in dactylic hexameter, a rhythmic style.… show more.

Homer’s Iliad is a fabulously exciting tale of action and heroism, as the mightiest Greek heroes fight beneath the walls of Troy for the most beautiful woman who ever lived. But there is so much more to it! It’s partly the tale of one man’s anger, and partly a timeless tale about war and sacrifice for all humanity. Homer confronts some of the most significant human problems with amazingly contemporary power and nuance: the beauty and horror of combat; the inseparability of glory and destruction; the raw emotional power of reconciliation between mortal enemies; and the fact that there is more to life than revenge and more to being a man than slaughtering other men. Richmond Lattimore’s inspired translation makes you feel like Homer himself is reciting the tales to you.

Once, on a weeks-long gig far from home, I stayed in a bare attic room with no TV, no internet, not even a radio. I didn’t mind. I had this translation of the Odyssey to settle down with every evening after work. I would think about it all day long: the vivid language, the fantastical events, the struggle and suffering of the protagonist. Reading it was like going to a technicolor movie every night, except that the movie was inside my head.

Talk about an essential human story—the Odyssey is four thousand years old, but its characters have the same emotions, fears, vices, and virtues we have today. Their struggles make my heart race and my eyes tear up. My imagination goes into overdrive, and I revel in the wonder.

Even after 20 years of separation, brought on by the Trojan War and the gods, Odysseus and Penelope hold on to their love and reunite in Ithaca. They must overcome tremendous obstacles: divine anger, violent suitors, jealous lovers, ghosts, and monsters.

Of course, the poem has double standards regarding relations between men and women. And yet, the central love story hasn’t lost its appeal since antiquity. Fitzgerald’s English translation of the Odyssey is one of the best and a wonderful creation in its own right: it’s a magnificent rendition of Odysseus and his world.

This is my favorite novel in Rieu's prose translation which has a real freshness, as if the very first book. I wanted that sense of freshness for my book, as well as the story of a man desperately trying to get home to his wife. The story takes place in the framework of Sam's 11-year-old imagination, and so carries him and his father through fantastic adventures as trying as those Odysseus faces in The Odyssey. 

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.