The Odyssey

by Homer
348 pgs

This was another bucket-list book for me--one that I think everybody should read during their lifetime. Having read part of it while in high school, and because I knew a lot of Odysseus's story, I was looking forward to reading The Odyssey.

It's the story of Odysseus and the twenty years it took him to return to his home and wife Penelope on the island of Ithaca following the Trojan War. It begins ten years after the war had ended. Odysseus has been the captive of Calypso who had fallen in love with Odysseus and refused to let him off her island. It takes the assistance of the goddess Athena, Odysseus's protectress, who takes the form of various people throughout The Odyssey, to help Odysseus finally get off Calypso's island and begin his journey home.

On his journey Odysseus deals with sirens, a cyclops, having half is men turned into pigs, losing most of his ships, an aggravated Poseidon, and other roadblocks on his path back to Ithaca. Once he arrive there he has a hundred or so suitors, who had been trying to convince Penelope to marry them for the past twenty years, to deal with as well.

It's a classic story, and again, one that everyone should read a some point in their life.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆