I’ve been watching a Mark Twain documentary while I’m running on the treadmill in the evening.
It got me thinking of a conversation I had at work today. I was talking about our book club reading The Odyssey this summer and one of the electricians on the job decided to listen to it while he was working. I suggested a good podcast to get his feet wet before he jumped right into Homer’s daunting epic.
At the end of the day he asked if I though Homer was writing history, or just a story? I said that there are different opinions on that and kind of trailed off.
Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer as a dramatic and romantic retelling of his childhood experiences I learned this evening on my run. Which has me wondering if that’s a good way of reading The Odyssey. Not unlike modern films we watch about wars and returning from a war of recent history being about history, but also being a romantic retelling of the events. Just like Tom Sawyer.
Just a thought.
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