Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicholson

Read the full post at - Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicholson I picked up Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson on a lark at the library. It was during the PR hype for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and it looked like a solid book. It was a fine read. A little too fast in places – there were parts I skimmed. But here’s my real issue: the whole premise could have been a blog post. Probably a tweet. The argument is that Homer matters because the Iliad and the Odyssey are the oldest surviving literature we have, and that they go back even further than the written word – back to the spoken tales of prehistoric people. They’re a window into how those people oriented themselves in life and the stories they told about it. That’s the book. Nicolson spends a few hundred pages getting there, and the getting there is where he loses me. What I Liked It’s academic and fairly well sourced. Nicolson is genuinely good at this kind of book – he’d previously written one about how the King James Bible came…