Most preparation lists for a film adaptation are wildly optimistic about your calendar. They hand you eleven books and a chart of the Greek pantheon and assume you have retired. So let me try something more useful and organise what to read before Nolan’s Odyssey by the only variable that matters, which is how much time you genuinely have before you sit down in the cinema.
The rush is real, by the way. Homer is currently outselling most of the frontlist. Emily Wilson’s translation has gone past a million copies in the United States and reached the No. 2 spot on the overall bestseller list in early August, while Madeline Miller’s Circe jumped 128 per cent in a single week off the back of the film, per Publishers Weekly. It has been a long time since a twenty-eight-century-old poem behaved like a debut.
One Evening: What to Read Before Nolan’s Odyssey
Read the first four books of the poem and stop.
This is my genuine advice and it feels like heresy. The opening quarter barely features Odysseus. It follows his son Telemachus, a young man who has grown up in a house full of men eating his inheritance and insulting his mother, and it establishes the thing the film is actually about, which is what an absence does to the people left behind. Four books is roughly ninety minutes of reading. You will walk in understanding the stakes.
If even that is too much, read the opening twenty lines. Homer summarises his own plot there, in public, before starting. Epic poets did not believe in spoilers, and neither should you.
One Weekend
Read the whole poem, in Emily Wilson’s translation. If you only do one thing to prepare, this is the thing to read before Nolan’s Odyssey.
It moves faster than its reputation suggests, and about half of it is a man telling exaggerated stories at someone else’s dinner table, which is a much lighter experience than the word “epic” prepares you for. Wilson’s English is plain and quick and she matched the Greek line for line, so there is none of the padding that makes some older versions feel like wading. If you would rather listen, Claire Danes reads it beautifully and it will fill a weekend of driving. We have gone into the alternatives in our guide to choosing an Odyssey translation, but for a single weekend the answer is Wilson and I would not agonise.
Two Weekends
Add Circe by Madeline Miller.
This is the one that changes the film rather than merely preparing you for it. Miller takes the witch who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs, gives her several thousand years of life, and lets her watch the famous hero arrive on her island as a stranger. Seen from her side he is charming, exhausting and not entirely trustworthy. Once you have read it you cannot unsee it, and every scene where the film asks you to admire him becomes a question instead of an instruction.
It is comfortably the most rewarding second book to read before Nolan’s Odyssey. Miller’s other novel, The Song of Achilles, is the more famous and the more emotionally devastating, but it covers the Trojan War rather than the journey home. Save it for after.
A Full Month to Read Before Nolan’s Odyssey
Now you can be greedy. What I would read before Nolan’s Odyssey, in this order:
- The Odyssey, Wilson’s translation, as above.
- Circe by Madeline Miller, for the view from the other side of the beach.
- The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, barely two hundred pages, which gives the microphone to Penelope plus the twelve women the palace hangs in the closing act without pausing over it. It will pick a fight with the ending.
- Ithaca by Claire North, narrated by Hera, which stays home on the island and treats twenty years of a missing king as a political emergency rather than a romantic one.
- A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, for the whole war told by the women who paid for it, and for a running series of increasingly unimpressed letters from Penelope.
If you want the family trees sorted out rather than another novel, Stephen Fry’s retellings do that job with more charm than any reference book. And if the appetite runs to the mythology rather than to Homer, our companion list of retellings to read after Circe goes considerably deeper.
What You Do Not Need to Read Before Nolan’s Odyssey
You do not need The Iliad first. It is the greater poem and I would not talk anyone out of it, but it is a war book, it is relentless, and starting there has stopped more people from ever reaching the sequel than any other piece of well-meant advice. Read it afterwards, when you want to know what Odysseus is carrying.
You do not need to memorise the gods. The film will tell you who is angry and why.
And you do not need to worry about being spoiled. The story has been common knowledge for something close to three thousand years; Nolan is working from a text whose ending was public before the alphabet reached Greece. Read whatever you like in whatever order.
If You Have No Time At All
Samuel Butler’s translation is out of copyright and free on Project Gutenberg. The English is Victorian and it shows, but it is complete, it costs nothing, and it is on your phone in under a minute. Read Book One on the bus. That is a perfectly respectable amount to read before Nolan’s Odyssey, and considerably more than most of the audience will have done.
The Honest Version
None of this is required. The film will work without homework, because the story was built to be understood by people hearing it for the first time in a hall, half drunk, three thousand years ago.
But there is a particular pleasure available here that does not come round often, which is watching a very old book turn back into a popular one. A poem that survived by being memorised is currently outselling almost everything written this year. Reading even four books of it before you go means walking into the cinema as a participant rather than a spectator.