Daniel Mendelsohn's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Daniel Mendelsohn recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Daniel Mendelsohn's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

The Infinities

On a languid midsummer’s day in the countryside, the Godley family gathers at the bedside of Adam, a renowned mathematician and their patriarch. But they are not alone in their vigil. Around them hovers a clan of mischievous immortals—Zeus, Pan, and Hermes among them —who begin to stir up trouble for the Godleys, to sometimes wildly unintended effect. The Infinities—John Banville’s first novel since his Booker Prize-winning and bestselling The Sea—is at once a gloriously earthy romp and a wise look at the terrible, wonderful plight of being human. less
Recommended by Daniel Mendelsohn, and 1 others.

Daniel MendelsohnI quite like this book. It’s an adaptation of a play called Amphitryon, which is more famous as a Roman comedy by Plautus than in any other guise, although Molière and Heinrich von Kleist adapted it. And it’s also about the possibility of parallel texts. Banville takes the plot of this ancient play – about how Zeus seduces in disguise the wife of Amphitryon, a woman called Alcmene, and begets... (Source)

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2

The Lost Books of the Odyssey

A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER

Zachary Mason’s brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer’s classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer’s original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is...
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Recommended by Daniel Mendelsohn, and 1 others.

Daniel MendelsohnThe premise is that there are other books of The Odyssey, aside from the canonical 24, which were lost – as so much classical literature is. This is the way in which he opens up a space to adapt it, and a lot of it is very ingenious. (Source)

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3

The Song of Achilles

Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. By all rights their paths should never cross, but Achilles takes the shamed prince as his friend, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine their bond blossoms into something deeper - despite the displeasure of Achilles' mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess. But then word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus journeys with Achilles to Troy, little knowing that the... more
Recommended by Daniel Mendelsohn, Lucy Coats, and 2 others.

Daniel MendelsohnI don’t want to know what Achilles did in bed, frankly. If you want to play with the big boys, fine, but don’t turn The Iliad into a Twilight novel. (Source)

Lucy CoatsI loved the richness of the language, the descriptions. She really made me feel I was in ancient Greece — the smells, the whole environment. (Source)

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4

Ransom

In his first novel in more than a decade, award-winning author David Malouf reimagines the pivotal narrative of Homer’s Iliad—one of the most famous passages in all of literature.
 
This is the story of the relationship between two grieving men at war: fierce Achilles, who has lost his beloved Patroclus in the siege of Troy; and woeful Priam, whose son Hector killed Patroclus and was in turn savaged by Achilles. A moving tale of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, Ransom is incandescent in its delicate and powerful lyricism and its unstated imperative that we imagine...
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Recommended by Daniel Mendelsohn, and 1 others.

Daniel MendelsohnI’m a great admirer of Malouf, and I always feel that here in the States he is not significantly appreciated as a significant writer. He wrote a wonderful book called An Imaginary Life about Ovid in exile, which is a beautiful imagining of classical antiquity. And in Ransom he hit the jackpot. Like the ancient authors, looking to pry apart a space in the existing body of myths, he finds a moment... (Source)

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5

The Iliad

Dating to the ninth century B.C., Homer’s timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to the wrenching, tragic conclusion of the Trojan War. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox observes in his superb introduction that although the violence of the Iliad is grim and relentless, it coexists with both images of civilized life and a poignant yearning for peace.

Combining the skills of a poet and scholar, Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim...
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Ted TurnerWhen I got to college, I was a classics major, and that was mainly the study of Greek - and to a lesser extent Roman - history and culture, and that fascinated me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil. (Source)

John GittingsHomer, like Shakespeare, encompassed all humanity in his work, and in The Iliad he encompasses peace as well as war. (Source)

Kate McLoughlinA lot of people who had public school educations, classical educations, might have gone into the First World War thinking that they were fighting Homer’s war. (Source)

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