The most recommended Iliad books

Catton was one of the Civil War’s great historians, best known for bringing the stories of individual soldiers into otherwise sweeping accounts of the American Iliad. Amid this work, he also wrote this little-known short novel, published in 1955, which today probably would be filed in the “young adult” section of your favorite bookstore. It tells the tale of Bob Hayden, a Michigan boy who lies about his age to join a volunteer company and rises to manhood while serving in Virginia with Gen. “Fighting Phil” Sheridan.

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.

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.

While generally considered science fiction, this one of Tepper’s books is centred on a society where men and women live separately – and why, and the effects of such a divided society on the lives of men and women. Although the divided society in my book owes more to Sparta than Tepper’s book, she gave me the idea to examine the consequences of such a society in my pseudo-post-Roman world.

Few today know of moral injury, and I found this book to be a great introduction to the condition. The heart of it concerns betrayal—by those above and even ourselves.

Often seen as the father of “moral injury,” Jonathan Shay reveals that the condition itself actually stretches deep into the bowels of history, at least as far as Shakespeare, if not the Homeric epics written 2,400 years earlier: a reminder that everything old is new again. 

Rather than acting as ventriloquist, Shay quotes his patients, allowing the veterans to speak for themselves; to express their traumas and the consequences thereof. And he emphasizes, as few do, the responsibility of society to aid in healing those traumas.

An accessible, practical read for understanding moral injury, trauma, and our communal responsibilities.

A masterpiece. Royall Tyler translates this tale, which had been recited orally by blind monks in the fourteenth century, into beautiful English; the rhythms of the language, its beauty, tragedy, and poetry become accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time. One of the greatest accomplishments in translation and a must-read for all interested in medieval Japanese warfare and epic war tales.

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.

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. 

In a world torn by wars, Jonathan Shay offers a stunning cross-fertilization of the Homeric universe of the Iliad with the experiences of today’s soldiers on the battlefield.

Shay, a psychiatrist with a long experience of treating Vietnam veterans and a profound knowledge of Homer, achieves a remarkable double feat; he shows how the Iliad’s accounts of the battlefield provide unique insights into the experiences of today’s warriors and also how these experiences offer a profound understanding of the metamorphosis of Achilles from noble and generous hero into a demented killing machine.

He identifies the betrayal of "What is Right" and the failure to grieve for the loss of a battlefield friend as crucial elements in a soldier’s rage (what he calls "berserkness") and its subsequent cause of insuperable psychopathologies.

I was in Greece, and read the Odyssey by and on the wine dark sea, imagining that it was all real. 

This is the Anthony Verity translation for Oxford University Press. I have read Fagles’s translation, too, which everyone raves about, but the Oxford classic editions have great notes, which help you appreciate the text. And they are smaller to pack.