The most recommended Iliad books

This is by all estimation the greatest of the sagas. I would even claim that its excellence allows it to be fairly mentioned in the same breath as the Iliad, Don Quixote, and the tragedies of Shakespeare. It is quite complex and I would suggest, if I am allowed to, my Why is Your Axe Bloody? (2014) as a guide. But the present Penguin translation is a travesty and should be avoided. The best English translation available is the older Penguin translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (1961) and still available from various used booksellers online. Their translation is as good as a translation can get. Hrafnkels saga is a perfect entry to the sagas because it is short and compact and prepares one for the complexity of Njáls saga. 

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.  

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.

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 book technically isn’t about the Iraq war but instead, about violence more broadly and it's super nerdy but super important.

As a soldier and sociologist, I’ve always been fascinated by the ways academia deals with questions of violence. In particular, since the popularity of moral psychology theories like Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory (popularized in his book The Righteous Mind), the running assumption in a lot of academic circles is that harm = bad. But Fisk and Rai show that violence serves social purpose such as bonding people together or teaching them group boundaries.

It’s a difficult read because it challenges people’s assumptions about violence and harm but that makes it all the more important in understanding how people come home from war and the ways in which they wrestle with actions they’ve done. 

Why not start with the oldest surviving long-form narrative there is. While purporting to account for the late reign of the very real King of the very real Sumerian city-state Uruk, the epic of Gilgamesh—very like the epics that the Greeks would offer some 4 to 14 hundred years later—trots out a world replete with the goddesses, monsters, magical drums, forests, and sacred undersea plants. The flavor of this world is first and most memorably signaled by the deliberate creation of a rival for its protagonist. Sculpted from river clay, then sexually domesticated by a temple maiden, the wild man Enkidu fights his way into a lifelong bromance with Gilgamesh that eventually confronts each with his own mortality. Again, for being the oldest such tale we know of, and for having to be chiseled on tablets, the whole thing holds up as a very living document, wildly entertaining, psychologically… 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.

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.

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.

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.