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My thoughts on the Odyssey are largely similar to my thoughts on The Iliad, in the extent to which this story told millenia ago about a people and a culture distant in all manors from mine remains engaging, entertaining, and apparently well crafted is of course remarkable. It is clearly apparent why the Odyssey is more referenced and revered than its sibling the Illiad, focusing on the more personal story, hitting more of the familiar Hero's Journey archetype, which is so much more common today than the Hero is Sad about his Slave Being Taken Away But Gets Better And Fights Everyone and Then There Is a Tournament archetype. Good enough that it is probably worthy of a read beyond just being one of the most influential stories of the western canon.

I don't think I gave this book a fair hand, I don't think the audio book did well. I was worse at following it than I was with my recent forays into Joyce, despite Faulkner's comparatively straightforward story and language. The ravings and wanderings and decayings and burnings and bloatings of the family and their journey, while not inexpertly conveyed, did not quite strike true. I think this should have struck me in the gut, and it did not. Maybe later, or maybe read in the usual oracular sense

Graerber and Wengrow paint a compelling and beautiful painting of new potentials for understanding the past & present. They set up a neat dichotomy between a Rousseaun and Hobbesian view of the origins of humanity, before bravely pointing out that it was maybe a bit more complicated than all that. Some powerful ideas around political and social organizational structure experimentation, differing practices and paradigms, the impact of play and the view of humanity as effectively originating in play. They walk an interesting line between criticizing the anthropologists who revere and idolize the way of life outside the State, and at the same time offering optimistict and bordering-on utopian interpretations of the same - but, after all, they have a good story for all of it, and a smattering of impactful and transformative ideas to think on. An edifying read.

I was wondering a lot about greatness while reading this. I don't think Italo Calvino is one of the greats, but I do love what he does. There is something a bit Borgesian about this, maybe Kafkaesque or maybe a bit more delightfully Snicketesque, and I think Calvino almost earns his own adjectivification, but not quite. This is a series of beginnings, a collection of stories by an author that doesn't enjoy writing the ends, a love letter about reading and then on the contrarywise a bit about writing, like the man from Borges who determines to write Don Quixote or like the man from DFW who determines to make the ultimate entertainment or like the man from Nabokov who gets tangled in the endnotes of Pale Fire. All wrapped in a delightful second-person framing device of international intrique, conspiracy, and apocrypha.

Fun & funky pursuit of a killer and pursuite of the killt, whodunnit and also just whatdunandwen, little bit of Christie and a little bit of Groundhog day, and a little bit of (frankly, somewhat cumbersome) sci-fi oddity. That frame though allows for a novel premise and take on the classic dinner-party-and-a-murder that entertains and engrosses.

Lots of X begat Y, lots of and Petracliffs, he had 50 black ships too. But I mean surely this was just the Avengers, a few millennia ago? Of a comparable level of cultural cachet! And the parts that were not lists had some quite-frankly surprisingly good writing, probably even better than the Avengers. A good reminder that even way back in the olden days people liked to be entertained and could be entertaining

I mean I thought this was pretty great actually. Tedious, sure, full of itself, sure, riddled with references and languages I either got, or as may happen, did not. I'm fine with a bit of navel-gazing, I can appreciate it, but 800 pages is a lot of pages of naval-gazing. Thank god for the audiobook I guess, not sure I would have finished otherwise, and but does that even count? And I wasn't always sure of what was going on or when I was who. But for all that - some of the best prose, an amazing project, an Odyssey for our time, a century ago. I should probably read the Odyssey. I thought the ending a just about perfect ending making for it a just about perfect example of that which it is. The characters were adroitly captured, Dublin adroitly captured, the time, adroitly captured. I liked how the words went together, and they went together in some wild ways. Not my favorite novel, but at the same time maybe the best? I can see why it might be the best.

I had to read this to better understand Hark! A Vagrant. And now I do! Everyone was so much more awful than I was expecting, and it kept getting worse. Great book

Fine I guess, decent writing and fun premise, but not much more than that, and doesn't really make me feel any which way - just "hmm yeah that seems a plausible story about darwin if he was an alien woman and I guess yeah evolution is kind of an interesting discovery."

Kate Beaton is great, this book is great, this book is heavy and traumatic and human and occasionally a bit sweet. Should be read.