BookFeed Ελληνικά If The Iliad stayed with you, these share its feel: war, awe and death. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.
About The Iliad · Homer
Sophocles, -429
Also passion. A plague-stricken city, a king who promises to find a murderer, and an investigation that keeps turning back on the investigator.
My lot be still to leadThe life of innocence and flyIrreverence in word or deed,To follow still those laws ordained on highWhose birthplace is the bright ethereal sky.No mortal birth they own,Olympus their progenitor alone:Ne’er shall they slumber in oblivion cold,The god in them is strong and grows not old. Beowulf poet, 1000
Also awe and death. A hall under nightly siege, a stranger who volunteers to face the thing in the dark, and a poet who makes boasting, grief and fate sound like weather. The oldest English epic.
He often permitteth the mood-thought of man of The illustrious lineage to lean to possessions, 80 Allows him earthly delights at his manor, A high-burg of heroes to hold in his keeping, Maketh portions of earth-folk hear him, And a wide-reaching kingdom so that, wisdom failing him, He himself is unable to reckon its boundaries; 85 He liveth in luxury, little debars him, Nor sickness nor age, no treachery-sorrow Becloudeth his spirit, conflict nowhere, No sword-hate, appeareth, but all of the world doth Wend as he wisheth; the worse he knoweth not, 90 Till arrant arrogance inward pervading, Waxeth and springeth, when the warder is sleeping, The guard of the soul: with sorrows encompassed, Too sound is his slumber, the slayer is near him, Who with bow and arrow aimeth in malice. Leo Tolstoy, 1869
Also war and awe. Five families, one invasion, and the small domestic hours that turn out to matter more than the battles. Read it for the people, not the history.
She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking root would so cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal from within. William Shakespeare, 1597
Also passion and grief. Two teenagers from feuding families fall in love over three days, and the adults around them keep choosing sides.
Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks,With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,Think true love acted simple modesty.Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;For thou wilt lie upon the wings of nightWhiter than new snow on a raven’s back.Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,Take him and cut him out in little stars,And he will make the face of heaven so fineThat all the world will be in love with nightAnd pay no worship to the garish sun. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1826
Also death and grief. A twenty-first-century plague empties the earth, and the last survivor writes down everyone he has lost. Read it for grief, not gadgets.
By degrees, our whole party surmounting the steep, joined us, not one among them, but gave visible tokens of admiration, surpassing any before experienced. One cried, “God reveals his heaven to us; we may die blessed.” Another and another, with broken exclamations, and extravagant phrases, endeavoured to express the intoxicating effect of this wonder of nature. So we remained awhile, lightened of the pressing burthen of fate, forgetful of death, into whose night we were about to plunge; no longer reflecting that our eyes now and for ever were and would be the only ones which might perceive the divine magnificence of this terrestrial exhibition. An enthusiastic transport, akin to happiness, burst, like a sudden ray from the sun, on our darkened life. Precious attribute of woe-worn humanity! that can snatch extatic emotion, even from under the very share and harrow, that ruthlessly ploughs up and lays waste every hope. Dante Alighieri, 1320
Also awe and death. A man lost in a dark wood is led down through nine circles of Hell, and the poet gives every sinner a voice, a grievance and a reason you half understand.
Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.’So eager did I render my companions,With this brief exhortation, for the voyage,That then I hardly could have held them back.And having turned our stern unto the morning,We of the oars made wings for our mad flight,Evermore gaining on the larboard side. Charles Dickens, 1859
Also power and passion. London and Paris on the edge of revolution: a man released from eighteen years in prison, a woman who knits a register of enemies, and a crowd nothing will stop.
Zane Grey, 1912
Also awe and power. A Utah rancher, a gunman with a hidden grief, and a valley of purple sage: the Western that taught the genre how to feel like a myth.
Emily Brontë, 1847
Also passion and power. A storm of a love story told by two unreliable narrators, in which childhood devotion curdles into revenge across two generations on the Yorkshire moors.
Bram Stoker, 1897
Also death and power. A solicitor's business trip, a seaside storm and a doctor's case notes, told through diaries, letters and telegrams so that dread reads like found evidence.
Victor Hugo, 1862
Also power and passion. A convict, a relentless inspector and a city on the edge of revolt: a huge novel about mercy, poverty and the price of a second chance.
Walter Noble Burns, 1926
Also death and awe. Silver boom, saloons and hired guns in the Arizona desert, told by a newspaperman who hunted down the ageing survivors and let them talk.
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