Hello Lads and Lasses!

    I recently read The Iliad (apparently by Homer, but it was written nearly 3,000 years ago so who can be sure?) Some people will bang on about it forever insisting you read it because “it’s a classic! it’s a classic!” and so on, but I would never invest a large amount of my own time, nor encourage others to do so, in anything like reading a book unless I actually wanted to and was going to enjoy it. So it was with that “Well it seems interesting” thought that I started to read it.

    I got a little bit distracted with the launching of the site etc while I was finishing it, but from start to end I would take any few minutes I could to get a couple of pages read because I actually wanted to know what happened! So just on that point alone I would say that this book is a success all these years later, but there is also something fascinating about it, without any spoilers the basic plot is: Two armies face each other outside the city Ilium, the armies battle and the book tells of the individuals involved and the power struggles in each camp etc. It is all standard stuff really... except for this being written back in the day, you hear of what the old Greek Gods and Goddesses re doing, how they come down and interfere, even fight alongside the mortals. That to me is the really fascinating thing in this book.

    There is so much interaction between the Gods and the mortals, it is an everyday occurrence to have a Goddess whisper in your ear or to see a God slaughtering your allies personally on the battlefield, it really did amaze me to see this sort of thing play such a major role in the story. Then you have all the turf wars between the Gods themselves in heaven, some want this some want that, it is an entire narrative of it’s own which with my lack of knowledge beforehand was completely earth shattering!

    It is not all great though however, there are a few things that niggled away, firstly there is the legendary “The Catalogue of Ships” chapter in which the leaders and ships of the Achaean fleet are listed. This is just a seemingly endless list of names and places that are incredibly difficult to pronounce and decipher (or at least this is what I found.) This pronunciation was a problem I had all the way through as having to stop and think about what a word should sound like really disrupts the flow of reading.

    The other thing that I found sort of disappointing was that it doesn’t really begin or end, it just starts up during a siege in the Trojan war and ends without really ending or tying anything up. But at the same time it has to be taken in to consideration that this was put together in a time when it would have been told out loud as a spoken story.

    These are only small gripes really, because like I said earlier, I genuinely wanted to read it to find out what happened, which at the end of the day os all that matters I suppose, remember that I only post reviews (that I hope are balanced!) for things things that i think you will enjoy, or things that I feel are worth looking at. So on that note I heartily recommend The Iliad to you all! I enjoy it so much that I also bought an audio version!

    If you are interested then please use one of the links below to buy from amazon, it won’t effect the price you pay but it means that if I am lucky amazon will give me a few pennies to help run this site!

I will be posting a new short story and the audio version of it tomorrow so check back for that!

Until then as always,

look after yourself and have fun,

dan