I didn’t really see what the big fuss was about in the first couple books. It seemed similar to any other book I’d read before. Later we got to the more interesting parts, where it’s Odysseus and his crew searching for a way home. I started to understand the characters better, who they were and why they were doing what they were doing. Although their customs and stories weren’t familiar, their characters were. We eventually got to the end of the book. Odysseus had returned home, finally his journey almost over. His final trial, killing the suitors was completed and the book just ends.

When I finished the book it was almost like waking up. It was all of a sudden, the book just seems to stop and say they lived happily ever after. I knew it was the end of the book, it just didn’t feel like it. Looking back on everything that I read, it was an interesting book to read. What makes The Odyssey so special is that it inspired so many other great tales. It layer the groundwork for millions of stories to come. It stood out because it was so influential to mankind, even today. However, that’s what didn’t make it my favorite book either. I’ve felt the reverberations from The Odyssey in practically every story I’ve ever read. It was cool to look back thousands of years to see one of the first ever types of that story, but it also made it harder to appreciate as a piece of literature. It still has it’s differences from any other current day story, and that’s what makes it so interesting. You get to see the customs and myths of the ancient Greeks, exactly how they saw them. The Odyssey is like a trip back in time, where people still believed that monsters still roamed the land and where people talked and acted in a completely different way.

It was interesting to read and see this whole culture that I knew nothing about, but not something that as a story really stood out to me. Part of me thinks that I’m missing something, some part that flew under the radar that made the story amazing, but I’m not sure. Maybe I didn’t fully grasp the true essence of the story, some core element that I didn’t think of. Overall I enjoyed reading The Odyssey, it was fascinating to go back to the roots of storytelling and see a time when the world was different, but I never really got to the point where I really loved the story and part of me is disappointed by that.