The most recommended Iliad books

Pat Barker is a fantastic author, but what I especially love about this book is that it’s re-telling a well-known Greek myth through the eyes of a woman.

This subtle shift in perspective changes the story from one of heroism to one of survival. It is a cleverly conceived and beautifully rendered adaptation from the epic to the personal, from the grand narrative to the intimate.

This book is highly recommended.

This epic by Homer has a great impact on epic culture.

Writing such an epic in the 700-800 BC era is mind-blowing, War of Troy which we used to read in comic books and movies has so well narrated citing the bravery of Greek and Trojan Heroes in the Iliad.

Everyone should read about the heroes of Iliad epic King Agamemnon, warrior Achilles and Odyssey’s Greek hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca and his return journey about the Trojan War. Greek mythology is always a great source of information about the ancient time wars and treaties.

Even though The Lord of the Rings is recognized as the classic of high fantasy, Tolkien himself was deeply influenced by Eddison’s book. It is here that the first concepts of the hero’s journey, while encased in a thrilling saga of protagonists against impossible odds are sown, and of the great worldbuilding that encapsulates such an epic.

Even though the story itself (a never-ending war between the honorable demon princes and an immortal witch king) is pure simplicity, Eddison added an amazing twist: he wrote it in 16th-century English. If you can imagine William Shakespeare writing Lord of the Rings, then this is it.

Some people may get turned off by the archaic prose, but once you get into it, the novel becomes a highly enjoyable romp, filled with action and adventure.

I’ve read other reviewers say this, and I have to agree Don Winslow has written a modern-day Godfather with City on Fire.

It has the classic ingredients of a reluctant hero, complicated multigenerational families, and conflicting ambitions within organized crime, all of which I love to read and to write. For me, great plots are never enough. Whether writing or reading, I want to be pulled into the people, culture, and place.

Bettany Hughes follows the infamous beauty Helen of Troy through 3,000 years of world myth, history, archaeology, and culture.

I first read this book as an undergraduate and I’ve returned to it many times over the years as a first class example of how to make use of every possible scrap of evidence when attempting to bring the past to life in three dimensions and vivid technicolor.

I picked up this book while on a study course in the United States – I was based in Washington DC and intended to visit some of the nearby Civil War battlefields, and decided that I needed to know more about the conflict. It was perhaps the first American history book I had read, and immediately I was struck by the very different style of writing when compared with European works.

For a single-volume account of a terrible conflict that did so much to shape the United States, this is probably unmatched. The people involved, from those in high-level political positions to the men and women caught up in the fighting, are brought to life in an unforgettable way.

I haven’t recommended The Iliad because it’s the oldest war story (perhaps the oldest work of literature still widely read), but because of the immediacy with which it still speaks of fear, rage, lust, and honour; all drivers of conflicts today as much as they were in our deep past.

The first time I read the verses of vivid, muscular language that Alexander Pope claimed "pour along like a fire that sweeps the whole Earth before it," they reached out across the ages and gripped me by the hilt. Millennia later, the dead can still speak to the living on our shared humanity. 

It’s known more for its brutal tragedy, but there are humorous sequences. Most involve the petty squabbles of the Gods. For me, these scenes, when farce invades the gritty epic, anticipate scenes in later war fiction where lofty generals, far from the trenches, make arbitrary decisions that… show more.

Imagine the Iliad, only with bunny rabbits.

Watership Down is one of those novels that really shouldn’t work at all. It has what on first glance would look like a trivial or even a ridiculous premise – it’s about rabbits; some of them with psychic powers, for Pete’s sake – but it is done with such conviction, written so beautifully, and imagined so fully that it’s nothing short of majestic. There is real violence and peril in it, and there is sublime pathos too.

It tells about loyalty, leadership, ingenuity, courage, and trauma, and it persuades you to take its premise seriously so you too, shudder with fear along with its protagonists as you contemplate the prospect of crossing a few metres of open ground, or sneaking into a farmyard where their may be cats.  

The Iliad is not a book on strategy. Nor on tactics, nor on logistics, nor on command and control, nor on any other individual aspect of warfare about which any number of lesser authors have written. An epic poem, it provides an unparalleled panorama of men (and, playing a secondary yet crucially important role, a few women) at war: the hope, the despair, the fear, the elation, the kindness, the rage, the horror, the love and the sex (which both increases the horror and to some extent makes up for it). All intertwined, and all pulsating along with the human heart. Probably written down around 750 BCE, but making use of much older material, for almost three millennia now it has been regarded not just as a classic but as the greatest classic of all. Unquestionably it will continue doing so for millennia more. 

The Lincoln Highway is the 1950s American version of The Odyssey with all the temptations, dangers, and dilemmas.

In the aftermath of their father’s death and foreclosure of the family farm, 18-year old, Emmett, a recent reform school inmate, takes on the role of reluctant hero steering his ship—a blue Studebaker—down the Lincoln Highway bound for California, with his 8-year-old brother Billy in the role of sidekick, navigator, and moral compass.

I am a sucker for a road trip yarn and Towles weaves a rollicking adventure chock full of believable unbelievable characters and inevitable, unavoidable twists and turns that left me gripping the pages as tightly as any steering wheel. And, oh that Billy… I couldn’t stop reading and didn’t want the ride to ever end.