Postby Sandwurm88 » 31 May 2017 14:17
Yeah, I'm about halfway through an M.A. in literature right now. I've heard The Alteration is good, so that's on the agenda at some point --alternate history is a really interesting subgenre that I haven't delved all that deeply into. I've read Man in the High Castle, which was pretty good, although I don't remember it too much; Lest Darkness Fall which was also pretty good; Bring the Jubilee, which was surprisingly excellent (it was really hard to find, even on Amazon).
As for my turning to the Iliad and the Odyssey, it's part of a kind of backlash-against-the-backlash. A trend nowadays in English departments is to eschew the traditional "Western Canon" and turn towards obscure works by African, Caribbean, South American authors. These works are often fine for what they are, but I don't think enough departments really even start with that foundation of great Western works anymore --the supposed monolith that everyone is lashing out against exists only as a nebulous cloud that represents all that is white, male, conservative, etc. and not as actual concrete individual works that people have read and studied closely. I thought it would be worthwhile to actually read a lot of these works that some of my professors enjoy disparaging, because I think they're more worthwhile (from what I've seen) than a lot of the stuff that is foisted upon us in modern day English departments. Also, in my experience, the "Western Canon" is far from a bunch of white guys agreeing with each other...
So I'll be rereading:
The Iliad
Six of Shakespeare's major tragedies (Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra)
Paradise Lost
And reading for the first time:
The Odyssey
The Aeneid
The Canterbury Tales
The Divine Comedy
Faust
The Pentateuch
The Gospels (never read them "cover to cover")
The Koran
And maybe a few others before I inevitably turn back to SF.