Homer’s pieces are normally tough to read because their written in a form I’m not used to. In high school I read The Odyssey but I must admit that I didn’t enjoy it one bit. I quickly gave up on it because the language just seemed to confusing. So when I saw we were going to read The Iliad I knew I had to get some more background about the book before I could start reading it.

By reading a brief summary about this book before I started reading it allowed me to understand what was going on right away. I flew through the pages much quicker than I had expected. To my surprise it is a fairly easy book to read and comprehend. The only thing that throws me off a bit is all the characters. Throughout Book 1 Homer must have mentioned at least 10 characters. It seems as if he doesn’t give much background as to who each of them are. Luckily, I remembered a couple of the gods from my high school English class.

It was surprising to me that this is a poem because normally when I read poems they are confusing and boring. From what I have read The Iliad doesn’t seem confusing and it has an interesting story line. Since I haven’t read a poem in years I’m not familiar with the correct way of reading it. I know with poems you pause differently as you would an ordinary novel. I wonder if reading it more like a poem versus a novel would change the tone at all.