The Odyssey Is a Bestseller Again. That Is Not a Bad Way to Meet Homer.

At the end of July, one of the bestselling books in America was The Odyssey. Emily Wilson's 2017 translation reached number two on the overall U.S. bestseller list for the week ending July 25, selling more than 31,000 print copies. The week Nolan's film opened, it had sold more than 17,500 copies. Those figures come from Circana BookScan via Publishers Weekly.

A Hollywood blockbuster sending people to Homer is not the most alarming cultural development of 2026.

Some of those copies will certainly remain unread. Books have been bought for worse reasons. The more interesting fact is that a large audience that might not otherwise have been thinking about Homer is now asking the useful question that follows any conspicuous adaptation: what is the actual thing like?

The film and the poem do not have to be the same thing

Arguments about whether an adaptation is faithful often become arguments about inventory. Is the armor right? Did this episode happen? Was that character there?

Those questions can matter, especially with a work that has accumulated nearly three millennia of artistic and historical baggage. But fidelity is more interesting than an accounting exercise.

In The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn argues that some of the film's most Homeric qualities lie in its braided narrative construction, while its characterization of Odysseus owes much more to Nolan's familiar world of troubled modern heroes. Homer gives us a hero who is clever, theatrical, manipulative, boastful, funny, and rather pleased with his own tricks. Nolan is much more interested in guilt.

That difference is a reason to read the poem, not merely a defect to record against the film.

The Odyssey is stranger than its résumé. Everyone knows about the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, and the long voyage home. Yet the poem begins with absence: a house being consumed by unwanted guests, a son trying to become an adult, and a wife surrounded by men who would prefer to treat her husband as dead.

Then, when Odysseus finally starts telling the adventures for which the poem is famous, he is telling them himself.

That matters. Homer is interested not only in what happened to Odysseus but in how Odysseus presents what happened to Odysseus. A man famous for cunning is also one of the principal narrators of his own legend. The poem knows this.

A film can give you the Cyclops. Reading Homer gives you the rather more unsettling question of what sort of man is telling you about the Cyclops.

If you have never read it, Butler is a very good place to begin

The current sales story happens to center on Wilson's translation, but there is no single English Odyssey that everyone ought to read.

Translation is already interpretation. Different Homers have been made for different English-speaking audiences, and one of the pleasures of a work this old is that we possess centuries of those attempts.

For someone reading The Odyssey for the first time, Samuel Butler's prose translation remains an excellent choice.

Butler gives up the attempt to reproduce Homer as English verse. The gain is clarity. His prose moves briskly, the action is generally easy to follow, and a reader who is primarily trying to discover what this enormous old story actually contains does not have to solve the translator's meter at the same time.

It is old enough to have the occasional Victorian turn of phrase, but it is not forbiddingly antiquarian. Project Gutenberg lists the Butler Odyssey as public domain in the United States and gives the text a reading-ease score of 75.5, which it classifies as fairly easy to read. The entire translation is freely available there.

Butler is not Homer with the translation somehow removed. No translation can be that. His decision to use prose is itself a large decision about the poem. Homer composed verse for an oral poetic culture; Butler gives us a highly readable English narrative.

For a first encounter, that can be a sensible bargain.

Later, one can discover what Alexander Pope does by turning Homer into magnificent eighteenth-century couplets, what George Chapman does with the exuberance of early modern English, or what any of the many modern translators emphasize. A reader who becomes seriously interested in Homer will probably stop asking which translation is the correct one. Comparing translations is too revealing.

Read it because the movie made you curious

There is a faintly ridiculous idea that the proper route into an old work must itself be dignified.

It need not be.

People have found Greek mythology through children's adaptations, paintings, comics, school assignments, television, video games, archaeological documentaries, and bad sword-and-sandal movies. Earlier generations encountered Homer through translations that now seem very peculiar indeed. Culture has never transmitted its oldest works through a single respectable channel.

If Nolan's Odyssey makes someone want to know whether the Cyclops episode is really like that, whether Penelope has more to do, why Athena is everywhere, what happens with the Sirens, or why generations of readers have found Odysseus both admirable and suspicious, the obvious next step is not another explanation of Homer.

It is to read Homer.

The renewed sales are interesting for precisely that reason. A gigantic contemporary production has not displaced the old poem. It has made tens of thousands of people newly aware that there is an old poem to go and look at. Some of them will discover that the book they thought they knew from cultural memory is odder, funnier, less psychologically modern, and more complicated than expected.

That is usually what happens when a classic survives its reputation.