I mean I dunno, I had fun.
great books curricula r white as hell and it’s sad
v true
i’ve taken it on myself to diversify my own library as catches my eye (hence all the eastern religious stuff, hopefully to be supplanted by more authors and key works e.g. edward said, ibn khaldun, ibn battuta, etc)
i do def want more recommendations along those lines tho
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Ok finally doing the thing
I appreciate how Lattimore’s Odyssey has little page summaries at the top
The most beautiful classic book I’ve ever seen, in terms of pure information and layout, is the Landmark Thucydides. Paragraph summaries, a heading at the top with the year, season, place, and topic, and nice maps.
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It’s so rare that publishers remember that books have centuries of user design improvements made to them and they should be trying to improve on them.
Or, I suppose textbook publishers look at it this way, but that should seep out into classics publishing as well (without turning into a USA Today infobarf)
When I first got the Landmark Thucydides I almost felt dirty, it was so decadent.
DECADENT LOGOS
is there a good edition of plato’s dialogues such that I
a. won’t have to buy like 8 different books
b. good translation
has there been a spin-off/homage/adaptation of the odyssey that is told from the perspective of one of his crewmen or w/e and focusing on how odysseus is such an asshole who never lets anyone do anything fun
i mean he kills the cyclops and gets the vendetta from poseidon or w/e, right, but then the whole rest of the story basically his entire responsibility is keeping the rest of the team from fucking up and eating lotus, sacred cows, whatever. then they all just get killed anyway, and then he comes home and kills a few dozen more people for good measure
wow spoilers!!!
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I think the most interesting thing about the Odyssey to a modern reader who’s absorbed all the various details through cultural osmosis already is probably the structure and what it implies about stuff anyway
but on the other hand I am just a shrug
Yeah it’s kinda remarkable how the actual voyages of the odyssey make up such a small part of the actual work but that’s the only thing remembered in pop cultural osmosis
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One of the reasons the Iliad is better than the Odyssey is that the actual Odyssey, rather than the 1/4 of it remembered by modernity, is an annoyingly on the nose morality play for a morality no one likes any more, where the Iliad is morally complex yet still alien
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welp. dahh fuck
tbf i have never actually read the original version i just saw a very adorable college student stage play of it that had me thinkin’
anyway sorry for the spoilers but you probably don’t have to read too far into it to realize that odysseus is a big a-hole
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i probably saw a wishbone of it once
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tag urself. im this guy
I just acquired a hardback copy of Landmark Herodotus, and man that shit is gorgeous. I’d definitely pick up any other books in the series if I saw them.