At the moment, I’m trying to plug some gaps in my reading. There are so many books that I’ve really wanted to read, but not got round to, or genres I’ve barely begun to explore. More particularly, I’m increasingly aware that I used to read loads of ‘classics’ when I was young, since I hit my late teens, I’ve barely touched an old-school ‘classic’. I think the last one I read was Tess of the d’Urbevilles and, let’s face it, it’s great but hardly a barrel of laughs. I think I just overdid it and went into a spell of not reading any.

So I picked up my forlorn and neglected copy of The Odyssey. What better way to get back into some classics reading than with a super-exciting adventure story, right?

Right! It was a lot of fun to read. It did, though, surprise me and that’s what prompted this post. The thing which surprised me is also something I loved about this book: everybody cries, all the time. Quite rightly! They all keep losing friends and relatives, being in awful situations, and on it goes. There’s something quite pleasant about it being explicitly okay for ‘heroic’ men to sit around weeping; it’s not something that often gets represented, I suppose. So it was a bit of a cultural shocker, but incredibly refreshing.

Not that I think representations of masculinity in The Odyssey were nothing but good, but this was a really positive aspect of the story, and I think I connected a lot more sympathetically with the characters as a result.

Have you been reading any books that surprised you lately?