Top 10 Contemporary Books Paired With a Classic

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for the top 10 contemporary books that would be great paired with a required reading book. I picked one classic and one recent book for each pair. 

1) Howards End and On Beauty: These two are an obvious match. One is a book about the unlikely meeting of two very different families and the other is a modern re-telling of the same story. The two are just different enough to feel completely unique.

2) Little Women and March (by Geraldine Brooks): Four women grow up with their mother while their father is away fighting the Civil War. Little Women is famous for barely mentioning the patriarch of the clan, March tells his story.

3) Flowers for Algernon and Marcelo in the Real World: Two men with mental limitations try to find their way in the world. Both are characters that get under your skin and stay with you long after the final page.

4) King Lear and A Thousand Acres: Shakespeare and Iowa don’t seem like an obvious pairing, but the tragedy of a king and his daughters works well when retold as a Midwestern farmer and his troubled family.

5) Babbit and The Corrections: I think I’ve made it clear that I do NOT enjoy Franzen, but this pairing shows what works and what doesn’t. Both are books about unhappy Midwestern families, one does it well; the other just comes across as whiny.

6) Gone with the Wind and The March (E.L. Doctorow): A classic about the downfall of the South paired with a book about Sherman’s march through the South, burning it down as he goes. Bonus: Vanity Fair would be another great classic to pair with Gone with the Wind. The two share so much, including a kind and gentle heroine who is best friends with a selfish and ambitious woman.

7) A Moveable Feast and The Paris Wife or French Milk: Hemingway’s memoir about his time in Paris in the 1920s pairs nicely with the fictional version of his wife’s life during that same period. It would also work perfectly with French Milk, a twenty-something’s graphic novel about her trip to Paris.

8) The Sign of Four and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective of all-time and a 10-year-old with impressive deductive skills. Both have a hard time with normal social interaction, but they always solve the case.

9) The Iliad and The Odyssey and The Song of Achilles: Greek epic poetry can be daunting, but paired with this love story the characters might become more accessible.

10) The Secret Garden and The Forgotten Garden: Two novels about secret gardens, one meant for kids, the other with a gothic mystery twist.

Greek Week: The Song of Achilles

The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

★★★★★

Greek mythology, character-driven narrative with an epic story, a heartbreaking love story, these are a few of my favorite things all piled into one beautiful book. I couldn’t put it down; I didn’t want it to end. I finally started reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology to slow my reading of this one.

Between The Odyssey, The Iliad, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and a college course on classical mythology, my knowledge of the Trojan War and the Greek heroes has been shaped and reshaped with different versions. Building on that base is this book, telling the story of Achilles and Patroclus. Throughout those other sources the pair has been painted as friends, brothers, lovers, etc. but one thing never changes: they are inseparable. They are dearer to each other than their own lives.

The first half of the book is the story of how they meet and the beginning of their friendship. The second half is the well-known story of the Trojan War. It’s retold through Patroclus’ eyes, which gives the whole tale a very different spin. All the familiar faces are there: Agamemnon, Odyssey, Hector, Paris, Zeus, Athena, etc., but many of them feel slightly different in this version.

Patroclus himself is a thoughtful, sensitive boy. He’s so unlike the other Greek warriors when it comes to brute strength, but his strength comes in a very different form. He’s willing to love against all odds, even when he knows it will end in a broken heart.

The reason this retelling resonated with me in such a powerful way is because of the characters themselves. Miller makes them so relatable. You feel for them in a way that you usually don't when you read books on classical mythology.

Chiron and Briseis particularly stood out for me. Chiron is a centaur who trains both Achilles and Patroclus for years in his rose-colored cave on a mountain-side. He is wise and kind and his home is a peaceful one, a complete change from the battle driven world they had become accustomed to. Briseis on the other hand is brought into Patroclus’ world in the midst of a bloody war. She is a prize from battle, but their friendship blossoms despite the circumstances and we see the best of Patroclus because of her.

BOTTOM LINE: I loved it. Sometimes a book lives up to the hype and this one did for me. I can’t say that you’d feel the same if you don’t already like Greek Mythology, but it was an absolute treat for me.

“Did he know, or only guess at Achilles’ destiny? Perhaps he simply assumed: a bitterness of habit, of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder.”

**One quick note about the kindle version. There was one incredibly helpful feature that really enhanced my reading experience. The character’s name were highlighted and when you clicked on them it took you to a screen with a drawing (see above) and a summary of the character’s part in Greek mythology.

Other Thoughts:

Iris on Books

Fizzy Thoughts 

The Sleepless Reader 

What She Read

Booklust
Book Pairing 
Necromancy Never Pays

The Iliad

The Iliad
by Homer
★★★★

Set in Ancient Greece, The Iliad is an epic poem about a decade-long war. The book starts when the Trojans and Achaeans have already been at war for years. The war itself begins because Paris (a Trojan), steals Helen, the wife of Menelaus (an Achaean). This gives the Achaeans an excuse to load up their ships and head to Troy to attack them. Helen is the woman behind the infamous “face that launched a thousand ships.”

***SPOILERS***

Paris’ brother Hector is a great warrior, unlike Paris, and because of this he leads the Trojan side of the battle. The Achaeans’ greatest warrior is Achilles, but a falling out with Agamemnon (Menelaus’ brother, leader of the Greeks) over spoils of war causes Achilles to refuse to fight. It’s not until Hector kills his close friend, Patroclus, that Achilles rejoins the war to avenge his friend’s death.

Confused yet? It’s pretty straight forward while you’re reading it, but it sounds convoluted when you try to summarize it. It’s considered the greatest war story ever told and so obviously there are a lot of battle scenes.

I really liked the moral dilemmas, but after awhile the battles seemed repetitive. I loved The Odyssey, (Homer’s book that followed one of the warriors on his journey home after the Trojan War), so much because it’s one man’s journey and every aspect of his adventure is new and unexpected. With the Iliad, Homer has to convey the exhaustion the men feel after fighting the same battle for years. The fatigue was contagious and I felt it about half way through the book. Things pick up towards the end because big players are dying and you know it’s all coming to a head.

The plot is frustrating at times, because the meddlesome gods cause more problems than they solve. They’re petty and territorial and they choose humans that they want to champion and they don’t care who is hurt along the way. It also seems to remove the element of free choice in the warriors; lives. They can choose to do something, but the gods will just prevent it from happening if they want to.

After Hector is killed there is a brief mention of Helen's loneliness. She was taken from her home and is treated horribly by most people in Troy because they see her as the reason for the war. Hector was always kind to her and she realizes that none of her only friends is now dead and the loneliness is overwhelming. Even though this is a tiny part, it was really poignant to me. She’s always painted as a guilty party in this legend, leaving her husband for another man, causing a war, etc. I never thought about how terrible her life must have been.

I couldn't believe that the infamous Trojan Horse makes no appearance in The Iliad. It's my own fault for assuming it was part of the book, but I kept waiting for that part ... and then it ended. Apparently the Trojan Horse in mentioned in The Odyssey, which I remember, and then the full story is found in The Aeneid by Virgil.

One of my favorite scenes in the book is the exchange between Priam and Achilles. Priam (Hector’s father) goes to talk to Achilles after his son is killed. He begs Achilles to let him have Hector’s body. The beauty of this scene is that it strips away ten-years of war and reduces the powerful Priam and Achilles to two grieving men. They aren’t on opposite ends of an epic battle; they’re just heartbroken individuals lamenting the cost of war.

***SPOILERS OVER***

In the end, The Iliad is a must read, not because it’s the best book ever, but because it’s a cornerstone of literature. It has provided the basis and inspiration for countless war stories in the centuries since its creation. It’s one of the oldest and most well-known stories in existence and that’s not something anyone should miss. But I would recommend The Odyssey over The Iliad if you’re only going to read one, even though that story comes after this one in chronological order.

I read this as part of A Literary Odyssey’s read-along.