I Wanna Fuck Like Romeo and Juliet by Andrew Rincon (Empty Space 2026)

I actually saw this back in August, but remain buried in unwritten blog posts and real life. I’m working on it…slowly.

 

One of the fun things about The Empty Space is that they devote a part of each season to newer, less well known plays, often ones written by younger playwrights. 

 

In this case, the play is by Andrew Rincon, who lists “he/she/they” as pronouns, but seems to go mostly by “they” in the interviews and articles I was able to find. I will therefore use that for this most. 

 

They identify as queer, which has transformed from the slur it was often used as when I was a kid, to a broader descriptor that tends to encompass a degree of gender and sexual fluidity and ambiguity. It works well for that. 

 

The play itself could also be described as queer - fluid, ambiguous, refusing neat categories. It is about love, but far broader than the “boy and girl meet cute” kind of story. 

 

The play is also saturated with poetry - references, quotations, and poetic dialogue. It opens with the voice of God, so to speak, who describes herself as a poet. Creation itself is poetry - something that many of us see in the holy writings of most religious traditions. 

 

The Poet (as the program describes the deity) goes on to introduce the plot, starting with the fact that Cupid is having an existential crisis. Too many centuries of seeing love go wrong has left her jaded, hating humanity, and ready to give the whole thing up and go away…somewhere. 

 

So, she removes her wings, and prepares to go through a doorway to…wherever. She is interrupted by Valentine - yep, the saint - who takes her down to earth, and challenges her to one last contest before she goes. 

 

These two have a history, it appears, although it isn’t entirely clear whether they were lovers or just frenemies - and does it even matter? They fight the same either way. 

 Cupid and Valentine

I adore the anatomically correct heart on her shirt

The challenge is to take a pair of lovers on journeys, at the end of which they will (hopefully) be ready to embrace each other. First deity back wins!

 

The lovers are not promising. Benny and Alejandro have just broken up, although neither can entirely understand why. Clearly, they both have baggage that they aren’t admitting they have, even to themselves. 

 Benny and Alejandro

Into this mess comes a fifth character, Betti, a dental hygienist who befriends Benny, and then falls badly in love with Cupid. Oh boy, this could get interesting.

 Cupid and Betti

That kiss from Cupid will mess you up... 

That’s the setup, but I won’t spoil the plot beyond that. Ordinarily, I would say to go see the show, but in this case, the run has ended locally, so I guess you will have to wait for the next time. 

 

I will give the hint that this is a comedy, not a tragedy, so, by convention, it should contain misunderstandings, revelations, and a final unveiling that leads to marriage. Or at least reconciled relationships. It is a fundamentally lighthearted play that happens to touch on some really serious and often dark topics - child sexual abuse, homophobia, mental illness. 

 

It also has a lot of sexual content and language, so not really for kids. (A couple of my adult kids went, though, and liked it.) 

 

The staging of this play reminded me a lot of when The Empty Space was at its former location, with a tiny stage, no real backstage, and a shoestring budget. Well, they still have the budget, but a good bit more space. For this play, everything was minimalist, cartoon-like and whimsical. 

 

A play like this, therefore, cannot rely on dazzling effects, but instead depends on the skills and chemistry of the cast. Fortunately, this one worked quite well. 

 

Central to the story is the relationship of Alejandro and Benny. Played by Salvador Vidaurri and Michael Hendrix respectively, this pairing really worked. They were believable as a pair of fundamentally tender young men, wounded in childhood, and struggling to find words for their feelings. Seriously, you just want to give them each a hug. 

 

Since these characters are the “straight” ones (in theater terms, not sexuality, obviously), the humor involving them has to be played deadpan and straight-faced, which is not easy. So, kudos to both of them for excellent performances. 

 

The broader humor takes place between Cupid (Victoria Olmos) and Valentine (Cameron Kovac), and again, this was a good pairing - they played well off each other and really did feel like they had thousands of years of history. 

 

And then there was Betti, played by Nikki Flowers. What a live-wire, over-the-top, too-big-for-a-small-stage performance it was. I’m not sure I had seen Flowers in a larger role before, but she was hilarious. 

 

Finally, Azra Joy played The Poet, visible only for the final bows. I liked the pacing of the storytelling, which tied together the various episodes. 

 

I wasn’t particularly familiar with the play before this, so I really didn’t know what to expect. I should mention that a lot of the play is in Spanglish - Rincon is Columbian-American - but it isn’t hard to follow. I am not fluent in Spanish, but I did grow up in a neighborhood where it was often spoken. I found I could understand enough of what was said to get the jokes, and for many of the longer phrases, the character repeated it (more or less) in English. Which is also a very Spanglish way to do it. 

 

As I said, this is one of those plays by younger, queerer, and browner voices, unapologetic for expecting audiences to get with the times. It was a fun experience, even for an old cishet white guy like me. 

 

While this play has run its course, The Empty Space has three more plays this year, starting with Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, a classic that I am looking forward to seeing. Check them out. 

 

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs by Wallace Stegner

Source of book: I own this. 

 

Wallace Stegner is one of those authors that I was aware of and wanted to read for years. I finally got a copy of this book, his last collection of essays. 

 

The title should be familiar to anyone who knows old time music. Back in the 1920s, Harry McClintock popularized a song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountains.” Around the interwebs, you often see claims that he wrote the song. This is false. While McClintock got a copyright for the song, it actually existed for decades before that, with various forms of lyrics - it was the typical folk song whose origins remain obscure. Also, the original McClintock version, before the recording, had far racier lyrics, as many folk songs do. 

 

Stegner remembers his father singing the song to him, and it made enough of an impression that he used the song title as the title for one of his novels. To him, as he describes in the opening essay in this collection, it represents the mythos of the American West, the misguided idea that it is an endless source of wealth and riches, open to all. In reality, the West is fragile, resource-limited, and has generally enriched only a handful of those who came seeking those riches. 

 

I have known for a long time that my father-in-law was a fan, and having read this book, I realize just how much of our conversations nearly 30 years ago, before I even started dating his daughter, contained ideas from Stegner. Like Stegner, he grew up in the west, particularly Utah, and shares a lot of what Stegner describes as the Western way of looking at life. 

 

What was more surprising, though, was that my father-in-law could absorb so much of Stegner’s environmentalism and realism about the fragility of nature - and indeed share so many of Stegner’s views - and fail to see that the Republican Party is the party of exploitation, destruction, and science denialism. He really should be a liberal. It is one of the great mysteries of our time. 

 

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs contains essays grouped by type and topic. The first is all personal stuff, about his childhood, about his life, about friends. The second is entitled “Habitat,” and is all about the living world. In this collection, there is a lot about water, which seems ever more relevant as climate change dries the west. But even before that, water has been overallocated by a lot. We are going to be forced by reality to change how we live in the west, as Stegner points out.

 

The final section contains essays about writers, from Steinbeck to Wendell Berry, and it's pretty fascinating as literary criticism. 

 

I won’t talk about every essay in the collection, but I do have some highlights. 

 

I very much loved his description of his childhood, his difficult father, his long-suffering mother. He writes with love and nuance yet realism about his parents’ limitations. The essay also illuminates a lot about how he came to be the person he was. 

 

The next essay, “Letter, Much Too Late,” is a love letter to his mother, who died too early, at age 50. Stegner wrote it when he was 80. It is impossible to miss the ache that he feels not merely at the loss, but also at all that his mother lost over the years, much of it because she chose to devote herself to her husband, who himself was careless of her needs. It is a story all too common, although not as common as it was in that generation. (Stegner was born in 1909.) 

 

I didn’t write down any quotes from any of the personal essays. I think they need to be read as complete works, and as a set. 

 

I did, however, take a lot of notes about the conservation essays. First is this one, that is so incredibly true yet seems to be ignored by most of the right wing. 

 

Stegner talks at length about the “myth of western individualism.” And it is a myth. The west has always been highly dependent on the federal government for its existence. It is federal infrastructure that has supported it, federal lands that have been exploited, federal funding that has sustained it. From dams and other irrigation infrastructure to the railroads to the interstate highway system to the extensive national parks, the west as we know it wouldn’t exist without trillions in federal funding. 

 

Beyond that, however, western humans have never survived as individuals, but in cooperative groups. The Mormons are a great example of that kind of society, but everywhere across the west cooperation is necessary for existence. I was born in Los Angeles, which isn’t (as Stegner points out) part of the true west - it is the Left Coast or Del Norte depending on where you draw the line - but I currently live in the west, where water is scarce, and a lot of the white westerners still cling to the lone cowboy myth, even as they depend on government for the basis of their survival. 

 

In a later essay, Stegner talks about this paradox.

 

Aridity, and aridity alone, makes the various Wests one. The distinctive western plans and animals, the hard clarity (before power plants and metropolitan traffic altered it) of the western air, the look and location of western towns, the empty spaces that separate them, the way farms and ranches are either densely concentrated where water is plentiful or widely scattered where it is scarce, the pervasive presence of the federal government as landowner and land manager, the even more noticeable federal presence as dam builder and water broker, the snarling states’ rights and antifederal feelings whose burden Bernard DeVoto once characterized in a sentence - “Get out and give us more money” - those are all consequences, and by no means all the consequences, of aridity. 

 

Yep. Get out and give us money. That is the western right winger in a nutshell. 

 

Stegner also talks about people like the Bundys, who took a federal building hostage because they didn’t like paying a paltry sum for grazing on federal land. This idea that everything would be better if the government went away is blind to all the ways they are dependent on the government. 

 

Never mind that grazing fees and coal and oil lease fees and timber sale prices are so low that they amount to a fat subsidy to those who enjoy them. Never mind that half of the money that does come in from fees and leases is given back to the states in lieu of taxes. Never mind that the feds spend the other half, and more, rescuing and rehabilitating the lands whose proper management would bankrupt the states in which they lie. NEver mind the federal aid highways, and the federally financed dams, and the write-offs against flood control, and the irrigation water delivered at a few dollars an acre-foot. Take for granted federal assistance, but damn federal control. Your presence as absentee landlord offends us, Uncle. Get out, and give us more money. 

 

And more later:

 

One of the things Westerners should ponder, but generally do not, is their relation to and attitude toward the federal presence. The bureaus administering all the empty space that gives Westerners much of their outdoor pleasure and many of their special privileges and a lot of their pride and self-image are frequently resented, resisted, or manipulated by those who benefit economically from them but would like to benefit more, and are generally taken for granted by the general public.

The federal presence should be recognized as what it at least partly is: a reaction against our former profligacy and wastefulness, an effort at adaptation and stewardship in the interest of the environment and the future. 

 

And more about the grazers like the Bundys who use BLM land:

 

Do they exist to provide bargain-basement grass to favored stockmen whose grazing privileges have become all but hereditary, assumed and bought and sold along with the title to the home spread? 

 

There are some other good observations about other things in these chapters as well. 

 

If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c, anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone. 

 

I too feel this way, shaped as I am by the places I have lived and the places I have loved. I also think that last line is amazing. 

 

Culture isn’t some monolith, frozen in time and place. It is, rather, a pyramid that we all are continuously building. This is yet another thing that the right wing gets badly wrong. They speak of “western civilization” as if it were a museum. And of course, it is a euphemism for whiteness. But more than that, it is the worship of an imaginary culture that never really existed. Culture has been built and continues to be built by all of us, whether they like it or not. Hence why Albert Murray insists that there is no such thing as “white American culture,” because American culture contains white and black and Hispanic and every other kind of culture that Americans of every ethnicity have brought to it over time. 

 

In another place, Stegner quotes C. S. Lewis. I admit I had not heard this quote before - I suspect it is not one of the ones white evangelicals like to use, for obvious reasons. 

 

“What we call man’s power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument.” 

 

Another interesting essay takes on the issues of violence and lawlessness in the west, and how they continue to haunt us through our national mythology. A few lines stood out. 

 

Lawlessness, like wildness, is attractive, and we conceive the last remaining home of both to be the West. In a folklore predominantly masculine and macho, even women take on the look. 

 

And this gem:

 

All this may seem remote from the life of the average Westerner, who lives in a city and is more immediately concerned with taxes, his job, drugs, the World Series, or even disarmament, than with archetypal figures out of folklore. But it is not so remote as it seems. Habits persist. The hoodlums who come to San Francisco to beat up gays are vigilantes, enforcing their prejudices with violence, just as surely as were the miners who used to hunt down Indians and hang Chinese in the Mother Lode, or the ranchers who rode out to exterminate the nesters in Wyoming’s Johnson County War.

 

These days, add in the ICE thugs, and the various MAGA rioters. The vigilante has always been about “enforcing prejudices with violence” and that hasn’t changed. 

 

Lawlessness isn’t exactly being against the law either. It is the idea that whatever the law enforcers do is right. As Stegner puts it when describing Western Novels:

 

Law is whatever he and his companions (and employers) believe (which means law is his and their self-interest.) 

 

This too remains all too common in our society today. 

 

Another essay in this section is a brief history of the conservation/environmentalist movement. He notes that there has been a gradual shift over time - in a positive direction. 

 

Yes, there was an environmental movement before Earth Day, a long, slow revolution in values of which contemporary environmentalism is a consequence and a continuation. We are still in transition from the notion of man as master of the earth to the notion of man as a part of it. 

 

This really is a necessary shift, and, in my view, a return to a healthier way of being in the world. We went wrong when we misinterpreted the blessing in Genesis to mean mastering nature rather than caring for it, and this misinterpretation hasn’t just meant the destruction of nature, but, as Lewis noted above, the exploitation of fellow humans as the means. 

 

The chapters on writers were also quite fascinating. Stegner definitely takes on the Cowboy Myth, calling for a more honest way of writing. While I haven’t read Stegner’s fiction yet, it is clear that his goal in his writing was to find that honesty. 

 

Real cowboys have more brutality and less chivalry in them than the literary kind. Some of them have been subverted by literary propaganda and believe their own myth. Others, I am sure, are trying to do what any writer is trying to do: render the texture and tensions of their own lives, their own occupation, their own place. Their trouble is that if they write with honesty about exploitation, insecurity, hard work, injuries, and cows, none of which make even a walk-on appearance in The Virginian and most of the horse opera it has spawned, they will find a smaller and less enthusiastic audience than if they had written about crooked sheriffs and six-guns.

 

He also talks about the difficulties of getting respect from the eastern establishment, which has tended to look down on western writers. 

 

But indignation and local puffery are not the ways to achieve stature. You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur. 

 

I loved that he specifically called out a number of Native American writers as being important western voices. You can find my list of Native authors here. I will note with approval that he names Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, and N. Scott Momaday, whose writings I have enjoyed. 

 

There is a line in the discussion of Steinbeck that I thought was interesting. 

 

A critic, by contrast, is not a synthesizer but an analyzer. He picks apart, he lifts a few cells onto a slide and puts a coverglass over them, he runs tests of the chemical components of spittle and sperm and heartsblood. His is a useful function and, done well, may greatly clarify the reading of a story - may even give a reader the illusion of understanding both the product and the process. But it is more reliable on the product than the process. 

 

I’m not a true critic - my blog is more of a reading diary than a critique of individual books. Although a few have been so bad that I have felt compelled to write a scathing review. This idea is interesting, though. Stegner is more of a writer than a critic, but it is interesting in what is essentially a work of literary criticism that he would be harsh on critics.

 

One author he discusses that I was not familiar with is Walter Clark. I am probably not the only one, as a quick online search brings up a law firm as the first hit for that name. I did vaguely remember that The Ox-Bow Incident was made into a film back in the day, but that is about it.

 

After reading this essay, though, his books do sound fascinating. 

 

One line about that book struck me as profound. 

 

That novel is a long way from being a simple reversal of the vigilante stereotype or an ironic questioning of vigilante justice. It is a testing of the whole blind ethic of an essentially false, imperfectly formed, excessively masculine society, and of the way in which individuals, out of personal inadequacy, out of mistaken loyalties and priorities, out of a fear of seeming womanish, or out of plain cowardice, let themselves be pushed into murder. 

 

Something to think about when it comes to the MAGA bloodlust against immigrants and LGBTQ people. Particularly the expression of personal inadequacy in violence, and the ever-present fear of not being “manly” enough. 

 

I read this book before Wendell Berry’s recent passing, so that chapter seems even more timely now. One point Stegner makes is that Berry wasn’t the typical - or better yet, stereotypical writer. He wasn’t self-destructive, didn’t die young, didn’t seem to have endless personal demons he was fighting. Rather, he was thoroughly functional, and lived a measured, intentional, and quiet life. 

 

We have grown used to the image of the artist as a person more notable for his sensibility than his balance. We might go to that artist for the flash of insight, often achieved at terrible cost to himself, but not for sober wisdom. I don’t disparage these Dionysian writers; they have lighted dark corners for all of us, and will continue to do so. But I find your example comforting because it restores a lost balance - one doesn’t have to be crazy, or alcoholic, or suicidal, or manic, to be a legitimate spokesman to the world, and there is more to literature, as there clearly is to life, than aberration and sadomasochism. 

 

The final chapter in the book is a humorous one, about a lecture Stegner saw, purporting to teach a formula for how to write a short story. 

 

Like all such formulae, in every facet of life, it was hogwash. Very few things can be reduced to a rigid failsafe formula - and neither childrearing nor literature is one of those few. 

 

My distaste for that lecturer stemmed partly from the fact that he was commercial, and I was above that, and partly from his carpenter’s-rule method, but most of all, I finally concluded, from the fact that he had nothing but method. He wrote from an unvarying blueprint. He pulled prepackaged frivolous surprises out of his sleeve to elicit a gee-whiz response. There was no fire in his belly, no passion or vision or doubt in his mind, no penetration or challenge in what he wrote. He illuminated nothing, opened no windows, left no worm of wonder working in his readers’ heads. He had nothing to say, and nothing to ask beyond the questions to which he had just precooked the answers.

 

That is the perfect analysis. Why even write if you have nothing to say? Writing is, after all, about communication. This also is the problem with AI, which also has nothing to say, just a method for saying it. 

 

This is not to say that technique, practice, and diligence have no place in writing. They are as important in the case of words as in music, and nobody wants to read an incompetent writer any more than they want to hear a violinist who has never learned to play. But in neither case is technique the end of the matter: one must still make art. 

 

I’ll end with a bit about John Cheever, which Stegner relates. 

 

Once at a literary meeting I heard someone ask John Cheever why he wrote. He replied without hesitation, “To try to make sense of my life.” That is the best answer I can conceive of.

 

I would agree. And also confirm that I write to try to make sense of my life. Books are a means to that for me, but I also write a lot about myself and the things I care about. 

 

Stegner never lacks something to say, or fails to show the fire in his belly. This book is a great example of that. The author shines through in the words, and communicates his passion and vision. That is what makes this book great, and well worth reading. 

 

Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This book was my traveling choice for a recent trip to stay at a friend’s condo in the mountains, hike, and play string quartets. It was a great trip in all regards.

 

Every year, my wife and I have a date night where we sip cocktails at our local tiki bar and go through the NPR book list together. We each make notes of what we want to add to our reading list, and talk about what we think is interesting and not interesting. It’s a great tradition. 

 

This book was one of the ones that I put on my list. I also put it on my Libby watch list, and it happened to be available. 

 

In thinking about how to write about this book, I realized that there was no good way to avoid spoilers, because pretty much everything I wanted to talk about was tied up with major plot developments. 

 

So, my solution here is going to be to give a basic “back cover” kind of overview about what the book is about, and then give a spoiler warning. If you want to be surprised by the book, stop there. If you have read the book, don’t want to read it, or don’t care about spoilers, then read on. 

 

So, the summary:

 

This is a lesbian coming-of-age story set in 1990s Ireland. (Where the author grew up, basically, as a queer girl.) This is the time when homosexuality was finally decriminalized in that country, but social mores were still very much in flux. Older generations and rural communities retained strong homophobia long after the cities and younger people changed. 

 

The book is written in the first person, with 17 year old Lucy as the narrator. It is also written entirely in present tense, which usually annoys me, but wasn’t terrible in this case. I can’t decide if the way it contributes to the “in the moment” feel of the book makes the book better than a more traditional approach would have been. Maybe. In any case, the writing is good, so it at least avoids that feeling of an amateur author trying to be cute and trendy. 

 

The book is also very much a teenage romance. The emotions are way too big, and the crushes bordering on obsession. They are definitely not healthy, in an adult way. I’ll talk a bit more about that, but with spoilers. 

 

The first third of the book feels really slow, and like nothing happens. In fact, just my own feeling is that the book really should have been shortened a good bit. Not that it is particularly long. Just that certain parts drag and seem repetitive. 

 

On the other hand, man does the book draw you in if you can get past that first third. Things then really start to happen, and the whole thing feels like a car crash you can see coming but can’t prevent. 

 

I also liked that a certain amount of what is said has to be said through letters. And the way that the book brings the Irish countryside of the modern era to life. The feeling of a world in transition is palpable. 

 

The basic setup is that Lucy is growing up in a large farm family, essentially in poverty. She has a group of female friends she hangs with. She is expected by everyone - and I mean everyone - to marry Martin, the sweet, kind boy on the next farm. They are, after all, best friends, and get along so well. 

 

The problem is, Lucy realizes she likes girls, not boys. And she is obsessed with Susannah, one of the girls in her class. Susannah is everything Lucy is not: rich and in line to inherit when she comes of age, academically gifted, and most of all, confident in herself. At least on the outside. And Susannah loves her back and wants to be with her.

 

Lucy is thus faced with an impossible choice: does she do the conventional thing and marry Martin, thus keeping her family and friends and (almost) everyone she knows happy? Or does she follow her heart and be with Susannah, thus losing her family and friends? 

 

At this point, I will give my spoiler warning. If you don’t want to have spoilers, stop here, get the book, and come back to read the rest. 

 

***

 

Okay, here we go. Something about this book really struck a chord with me, to the point where I actually remembered a number of lines fairly close to word for word, and jotted them down when I got home. 

 

It wasn’t just that I enjoy queer romances - I do! I’m a cishet guy, but I enjoy stories about love between women and between men - love is love. Also, though, my experience is that women write better sex scenes than men, and that gay people write better sex scenes than heterosexual people. Anyway, poke around a bit on my index of books by queer authors, and you will find romances old and new. 

 

The reason this book affected me as much as it did is that there is a lot in here that mirrors my own experience of being rejected by my parents. 

 

As I said, I am not gay, although that obviously would have been a major reason that my parents would have rejected me. I don’t want to sound like I am comparing my own experience entirely with the far more difficult one of being a sexual minority in a bigoted society. That’s a whole other level of trauma. 

 

But there are some connecting realities. My parents’ rejection of me has everything to do with what I call the Gospel of Genitals™. The idea is that genitals are destiny. One’s genital configuration determines one’s life. 

 

Thus, being gay is sinful because it is doing something that someone with your genital configuration is not permitted to do. 

 

This applies to so much more than sexual activity, however. Vagina people are to be subservient to penis people. They are to devote themselves to unpaid domestic labor, not economic activity. They are to dress to please men…but not too much. 

 

Men, too, of course have expectations about their roles, but these are not enforced as heavily as those on women and LGBTQ people. 

 

It’s more than just genitals, though, because it is a whole cultural landscape. For Lucy, her destiny as others saw it was to marry Martin, become a farm wife, have a bunch of kids, go to mass, and fulfill a certain kind of life that never appealed to her. 

 

For my wife, my parents expected something very similar, minus the farming. In other words, and even more narrow and restricted kind of life. 

 

In addition, this is all tied up with politics here in the United States. To be my parents’ kind of Christian, you have to support Republican politics. And if you point out that many of them are deeply harmful to other humans, you find yourself cut off, like I did. 

 

Ultimately, I was not the child they wanted. I was a divergent thinker with an active bullshit detector. I questioned everything, including their politics and theology, and refused to simply affirm their beliefs and choices. I wouldn’t and indeed couldn’t be a clone of them when it came to religion, culture, and politics. 

 

All this to say that my experience with my parents felt a lot like what Lucy experiences. Neither of us could be ourselves. We had to lie and sneak and hide who we really were. Love was entirely conditional, and easily lost. 

 

Okay, so here come the spoilers.

 

In the book, Lucy and Susannah finally get together about a third of the way through the book. The romance isn’t particularly healthy, at least on Lucy’s part. She is clearly over-obsessed, and yet also terrified of being found out. Susannah has a troubled relationship with her mother already, and her father left the family for another woman years ago - but at least he is progressive, so he is the one person who doesn’t freakout about having a lesbian daughter. 

 

In an interview, the author noted that while she writes queer characters, and obviously has to include all the cultural and familial crap they experience, she goes out of her way to write stories where the queer characters create or at least contribute to their own problems. And Lucy sure does.

 

As she gradually realizes as the book goes on, she isn’t a particularly good person. She uses people. She strings them along. She lies and manipulates to protect herself. And, unsurprisingly, she ends up hurting people. 

 

The romance can’t last, because Susannah wants to go public, and Lucy refuses. Before this can, by itself, ruin things, catastrophe strikes: Lucy’s mom discovers them in flagrante and freaks out. She punishes Lucy by essentially giving her the silent treatment. 

 

At that age, Lucy simply cannot just put up with this, so she decides to win her parents back. And the only way she knows to do that is to pretend she loves Martin. 

 

This is the big mistake, because as besotted as Lucy is with Susannah, Martin is equally besotted with her. She is his dream girl, and he wants nothing more than to be with her forever. 

 

Thus, Lucy sets poor Martin up for heartbreak, in order to save her own skin. 

 

When she finishes high school, college is not an option due to finances. Instead, she is given a horrible choice. Susannah has come into her money, and asks Lucy to run away with her. Lucy is unwilling at that point to surrender her fantasy of having a relationship with her parents, so she declines, breaking Susannah’s heart. 

 

Susannah finally tells her that if she wants to go to the city, she is going to have to do it alone. That Susannah deserves better than what Lucy is willing to give her. And she is completely correct about this.

 

Her parents, on the other hand, start tearing her room apart, getting rid of her things. She has one choice only according to them: go with Martin to the city. Interestingly, they seem to be fine with her shacking up with Martin. 

 

As her mom says:

 

“You might as well go with Martin, because there’s nothing left for you here.”

 

So she does. But there in the city, she realizes that she is deeply unhappy. She tries so hard to love Martin, and to make him happy, but it is all wrong.

 

“I didn’t hate having sex with Martin, but I didn’t like it either.”

 

She ends up doing two things to cope, neither of which is healthy. First, she sends a letter to Susannah, restarting a kind of dysfunctional long distance relationship. Second, she starts sleeping with a lesbian coworker, who has feelings for her. Yep, this is not good. 

 

At the end, everything goes to absolute shit. 

 

Susannah finally decides she cannot continue to have a relationship with Lucy. In one of the most heartrending lines, she admits that the two of them had an intense and loving relationship that year, but now all she remembers is crying. 

 

Oof.

 

In the meantime, Martin has gone back home for Christmas, and the girls who used to be Lucy’s friends brutally tease him that Lucy was “riding Susannah O’Shea all that year.” He doesn’t believe them until he discovers Lucy’s passionate correspondence with Susannah, and his world comes undone. 

 

He realizes in retrospect that he should have seen the signs all those years that Lucy was lesbian and didn’t feel the same way about him as he did for her. 

 

The discovery scene is wonderful and heartrending. Lucy is crushed and repentant that she has hurt her best friend. The best line:

 

“I wish everything was different. I wish I was different.”

 

Martin’s response is so in line with his character:

 

“I don’t wish you were different, because then you wouldn’t be my Lucy.”

 

Lucy is sure in the moment that he will be angry at her later, that he will hate her, and that they will never see each other again. But this is her response to every fight with everyone else. She is of that age and personality where everything is a catastrophe. 

 

But I suspect that Martin will remain her friend, and return to some sort of a relationship with her later. He isn’t a bigot, and they work really well as friends. Perhaps I myself can understand this because if, for some reason, my wife and I hadn’t been compatible as spouses, I would still want to be friends. 

 

You have to feel terrible for Martin, though. The love of his life doesn’t reciprocate. He will live his life in the small town, farming his family farm. Eventually, perhaps, the scandal will die down and be forgotten. But for now, he will live with the infamy of being cuckolded. And he did nothing to deserve it. Sure, he missed the signs. But he was also freaking eighteen! One hopes for healing for him, and eventually a woman that adores him for the good man he is. 

 

The book also ends with the possibility that Lucy and Susannah will get to be together, and find the basis for a healthier relationship now that they have grown up. One hopes so for both their sake. Sure, Lucy is immature and has made a hash of things, but she has the potential of growth as she becomes an adult. Already, but the end of the book, she has realized a lot of important things about herself, and about relationships. 

 

And this leads to the last thing I want to discuss. Parents. 

 

I do not think that Lucy will ever have a relationship with her parents again. 

 

This is where I am at myself. I can’t remember if a character says it, or if Lucy just realizes it, but this one line just gutted me. I am not sure if I have the wording correctly, because it was several days before I could write it down, but it was substantially this:

 

The love of a parent is the most fragile because it is the most easily withdrawn. 

 

Damn. 

 

And it is true with my parents, at least. I hope and pray to god, the universe, and whatever else may be out there that it isn’t true for me with my own kids. GOD I hope not. I do not want to have such fragile and conditional love for the incredible people my children are. 

 

Near the end of the book, a minor character, Evelyn, a city neighbor of Martin and Lucy, who has become Lucy’s confidant, says this about Lucy’s fear of losing her family and her female friends from childhood:

 

“If you would lose them for this, then you never had them.”

 

That is exactly right. I never had my parents. They never cared for me that way. If they did, they wouldn’t have thrown me away so easily, and for such stupid stuff. Stuff like whether I could listen to music in genres created by black people. Stuff like whether I believed in science or superstition. And especially my politics. 

 

Ultimately, I couldn’t be myself and have a relationship with them, because who I was was not acceptable to them. It never was. All our fights through my teen years can be boiled down to that. I would not conform. I would not shut up. I would not live my life to their specifications. And since I wouldn’t do that, I was worthless to them. 

 

Like Lucy, I wasted far too much of my life trying to retain a relationship with my parents. And ultimately, the effort failed. Even though I sacrificed so much to try to win their love. I gave up my chance at normal college. I gave up my chance to choose my own career. And, like Lucy, some of that was unavoidable. I didn’t have resources any more than she did to just leave home at 18 without any means of support. 

 

So I did what I had to do. I hid myself. I went along. I tried, like Lucy, to make myself acceptable to them. I’m sad that it came to that, but this is one reason the book got to me. I recognize that feeling that there is no choice but to hide who you are to survive. 

 

More embarrassing is that I actually offered to give my then-girlfriend up if they disapproved. I am grateful my dad didn’t take me up on that, but I am still horrified that I even offered. The thought that I might have thrown her away for parents who would never accept me is a great shame to me even now, after 25 years of marriage to my best friend. 

 

As LGBTQ people have understood since forever, ideology will eventually collide with reality. For them, and for me, we eventually had to stand up and say “your ideology does not match my lived reality.” Alas, when ideology has become your identity, as it has for my parents, you cannot accept any reality that doesn’t match. And that usually means getting rid of the people whose existence causes you cognitive dissonance. 

 

I have seen this in so many families where a child has come out. It goes one of two ways. Either the parents realize that their ideology and theology are untenable, or they double down on their beliefs and destroy their relationship with their child. I have a cousin who is dead of suicide because their parents chose the latter. 

 

In the case of Lucy as well, her mother made it clear that she would rather have a dead child than a gay one. Some children will take that deadly seriously. 

 

So yes, this book got to me a bit, particularly at the end. 

 

Like Lucy, a combination of maturity and circumstances forcing my hand, I eventually came to the realization that I would inevitably lose my parents. And that I should determine no matter what, that I would have to refuse to lose myself and those who truly loved me. 

 

Sadly and perhaps ironically, it would turn out to be my acceptance and affirmation of LGBTQ people that would be what convinced my mother that I was not “walking in truth” and therefore going to hell. Which, in my case, would mean that in order to please her, I would have to reject my own children. And you can guess who I would choose every single time. 

 

 Jane Austen perhaps anticipated this state of affairs, in Pride and Prejudice:

 

“An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. -- Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.'' 

 

This is why I am pretty sure that, while Lucy might be able to rebuild her relationship with Susannah, and probably will remain friends with Martin, I do not see the relationship with her mother in particular ever coming back. There are lines that cannot be crossed, and certain rejections that cannot be repaired. 

 

Once a parent makes clear that their love is conditional like that, I’m not sure how you can repair that betrayal. 

 

***

 

I wanted to end this post on a lighter note, sort of at least. One of the other things about this book that moved me was the question of first loves and broken hearts. And also teenage love. 

 

I never had a teenage romance. 

 

I wasn’t allowed to. Not allowed to date. Not allowed to risk my heart until I was ready to marry, and only then in a relationship that was expressly headed to marriage. 

 

In addition to that, my sister did her best to drive away any female that was interested in me or my brother, even as friends. (I found out about a lot of this years later, reconnecting with women that I knew from that era.) 

 

I didn’t go on my first date until the age of 23. I have only ever dated my wife. We got married relatively young - especially her. 

 

So, in a very real way, she was my first love, my first great romance. I have no regrets about that, and do not wish I had had other romantic and sexual experiences. I found a good one the first time.

 

For this reason, though, I do not entirely understand the experience of obsessive teenaged love. 

 

What I do understand is that you never get over your first real love. It stays with you all your life. After 25 years of marriage, I would be wrecked if my wife left. But I would have been after 1 year as well. 

 

Perhaps that is why I root for first loves, even though I know that for many people, first relationships don’t work out - and indeed shouldn’t. 

 

So yes, I am rooting for these two imaginary girls to recapture their love as adults. Does it happen? The book doesn’t say. So I will just have to hope. 

 

Sunburn is worth checking out. It’s not a perfect book, and it is emotionally exhausting at times, but it captures the cultural dynamics of being an outsider in one’s own family and village, as well as the struggles of being young and inexperienced and unsure of how to build a future. 

 

The Odyssey (film)

My love of The Odyssey goes way back. 

 

I am pretty sure my first introduction to it was, of all things, the iconic episode of Duck Tales. Perhaps the lost city of Ithaquack was irresistible…

 

Anyway, I first read The Odyssey in my teens - I still have that paperback of the E. V. Rieu prose translation. I re-read it at least once in the years that followed, and also eventually obtained a hardback of the classic Robert Fitzgerald poetic translation, which I then read. 

 

It has been a while since I re-read it, however. During high school, each of my kids in turn has read at least excerpts, and in some cases, the entire thing. I do need to return to the work, and recently purchased the newish Emily Wilson translation. 

 

I have also read a number of works, ancient and modern, that are related to the Trojan War and the stories told about it. I will list my recommendations below, and, if applicable, link to my blog posts about them. 

 

So, in any case, I care about The Odyssey, and am fairly familiar with its details. I also am fully aware that no movie can capture a book. Even the best, which take many hours of screen time - the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice and the original Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies - will omit things, and change others to fit the new medium. 

 

I thus went into this movie expecting that it would be different from the book and be missing things I thought were important. In this case, seeing it with my teenagers, we were able to compare our own thoughts on what should not have been left out. 

 

There are several reasons I wanted to see the movie, despite knowing that it would disappoint in some ways. First, friends with good judgment enjoyed it, so that was a bonus. Second, from what I could tell, Christopher Nolan genuinely loved the Homer original, and made a good-faith attempt to capture its magic. (And I will say that I think he succeeded.) 

 

Third is that certain right-wing assholes were quick to whine about the casting. For entirely predictable reasons. I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to support art that gave the middle finger to bigots. 

 

Maybe I should start with the casting, because I thought it was excellent. And also, for the most part, age appropriate. 

 

Let’s get the stupidest part out of the way first: of COURSE the casting isn’t “accurate.” The movie is filled with actors of northern European descent, which would not have been what Mediterranean peoples would have looked like 2500 years ago. Calypso should not have been blond. 

 

To the extent that a fictional story could be said to be “accurate,” the casting should have been mostly ethnic Greeks for the Greeks, and mostly ethnic Turks (and Armenians) for the Trojans. There should have been a lot more Arabic people, and the most “white” the actors should have been was Italian. 

 

Oh, and Mentor should have been played by a woman, right? Because Athena, yo. 

 

In fact, the presence of black people in the movie is actually the most “accurate” part of the casting. 

 

So right wingers can go soak their heads. 

 

It should be obvious that I am being snarky and silly here. There is no “correct” way to cast a fictional story, particularly one that is ancient and has been told and retold for literally thousands of years. 

 

I mean, we need a Muppet version of this, right? With Animal as Polyphemus, and Miss Piggy as Calypso? I’m down. 

 

If right wingers can’t handle the idea that the face that launched a thousand ships might be black, or that the Greeks might have accepted a bit of gender bending, then they probably would be unable to handle actual ancient Greek literature. Just saying. 

 

So, on the casting decisions that I loved. First, Matt Damon was perfect for the role. I loved the performance, and I loved how he brought out the themes of the movie in a believable way. 

 

Likewise, Tom Holland was believable as Telemachus, and John Leguizamo was outstanding as Eumaeus. I also love Anne Hathaway, and she was fine as Penelope. Even Robert Pattinson pulled off the villain role. 

 

I also liked Elliot Page, particularly when he became a shade. (I suspect a lot of the right wing rage at him is because they are furious he is no longer a young woman they fantasized about fucking.) 

 

I think, though, that my favorite part about the casting is that it was age-appropriate. In a prior era, Penelope would have been played by a woman in her 20s. Because ya gotta have the hot woman, right? Instead, at age 43, Anne Hathaway is precisely a believable age for a woman whose husband left her with a young child 20 years prior. Matt Damon at 55 may be older than her, but entirely likely for the era - and the aging of Odysseus from 35 at the time of the war to 55 on his return seems about right. After all, Odysseus is already the elder statesman at the start of the war. 

 

Likewise, Circe (Samantha Morton) and Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) are in their 40s, while Calypso (Charlize Theron) is in her 50s. Yeah sure, they are all more attractive than average - they are movie stars - but they are also not a generation younger than the male characters. Major kudos to Nolan for these choices. 

 

There aren’t that many women in the original, so there aren’t that many in the movie. The two younger actors are Zendaya as Athena (fascinating and totally defensible), and Mia Goth as the faithless servant girl Melantho (and she should be young.) 

 

I also want to note that I find the complaints about the use of “modern” language - probably also meaning American English rather than the King’s English - and certain anachronisms to be a bit silly. Yes, that is a Viking ship, but whatever. Even my 18 year old, who is passionate about ships and can freebuild stuff from the Age of Sail with legos, thought that the ship was great, and the sailing scenes far more realistic because they were real. 

 

My next thought on the film: why was it rated R? Yes, it is violent, but not that graphic. As various online commenters have noted, if the movie had used light sabers and blasters instead of swords and arrows, it would have been PG-13. There is very little language. And essentially no nudity except for the sirens seen at a long distance through fog. I mean, there is nothing more provocative than you would find in The Simpsons. Seriously. 

 

So I have no idea why it got an R rating. 

 

Now, about the omissions and changes. Each of us had something that we missed. My 15 year old noted that she missed Odysseus first calling himself “no man,” then blowing it by revealing his real name. I agree that this should have been in the movie, and that the change was not for the better. 

 

I do understand why certain things were cut. For example, I was not at all surprised that the episode with Nausicaa was left out. We knew that there was no way the servant girls all get murdered at the end. And I can go along with the merging of the island of the lotus eaters with Calypso. I can see leaving out the bag of winds. I can even see leaving the gods mostly out of it, given Nolan’s wish to focus on ethical issues and the responsibility we humans have for our own behavior. We have blamed the gods for too long as it is. 

 

What I was most disappointed to miss was near the end. One of the most important character developments was when Telemachus and Odysseus realize that Telemachus is fully capable of stringing his father’s bow. At that moment, Telemachus becomes a man, and that doesn’t really happen in the movie. So a bit of a fail there. 

 

There were a lot of things I did love, however. Overall, the cinematography was exceptional, mostly done without CGI. The cyclops was primarily puppetry, and the Laestrygonians were an old school combination of large and small body doubles and forced perspective. Scylla was really the only major digital creation. All of the live-action effects help the movie avoid the feeling so many modern movies have of physics not really applying. Every fall feels real and heavy and painful, and I heartily approve. 

 

The shipwreck scene in particular was brilliantly filmed. That was a real wow moment, and by using old-school special effects, including lighting, it felt real. 

 

I also loved that Nolan incorporated other elements of Greek mythology. Including the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy made sense not only because it is a crucial part of the story that The Odyssey just assumes the reader knows, but also because of the film’s focus on Zeus’ Law and the duty we owe to our fellow humans. For Odysseus’ character arc, understanding his guilt for his betrayals, both of the Trojans and later the Cicones (although these are somewhat blurred in the movie), is important to understand why he cannot stay in Ithaca. 

 

Likewise, it is helpful to understand the aftermath of the war for Agamemnon, who has used his brother’s wife as an excuse to invade and destroy Troy. Honestly, Agamemnon is the source of so much evil that follows. His sacrifice of his own daughter leads to his own death and a sequence of revenge and murder. His greed and arrogance in taking Achilles’ sex slave forms the center of The Iliad and leads to the prolongation of the war and much needless death. 

 

It also is good to remind (or inform) audiences that Helen and Clytemnestra were sisters. There is a whole dynamic there for sure. (Brothers marrying sisters? What could go wrong?)

 

Nolan didn’t just draw in ancient sources either, but acknowledged the later works that commented on and remixed the ancient story.

 

In particular, Tennyson’s poem Ulysses is woven throughout the movie. I didn’t entirely notice it at first, but at the end, when there are a few phrases and ideas from the poem, as Ulysses prepares to depart for the West. Looking back, however, it can be seen that the poem has haunted the movie from the beginning. 

 

Nolan runs with Tennyson’s idea that Telemachus is better than his father at the soft arts of governance. That he is more just and less violent by nature. Here is how Tennyson puts it:

 

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

 

Odysseus is the trickster, the cunning fighter, the deceiver, the destroyer. Telemachus is the builder, the thinker, the alliance-builder. 

 

And so in Nolan’s vision, Odysseus travels to the west not merely to have one final adventure, or some final great work to do, but to do penance for his past, to in some way make right what he can. 

 

I will admit that the ending of the movie made me tear up. I have always loved the Tennyson poem, and hearing just enough at the end was moving. And it also did so much to tie the themes of the movie together. To make Odysseus a complete character. To be a return to being the man that Penelope loved, not the monster the war made of him. 

 

All of this, to me, was a great thematic choice. It would have been easy to make a hero out of Odysseus - there have been plenty of bombastic action movies set in ancient times already, and they sell. It would have been possible to make Odysseus into a villain - Shakespeare already went there. 

 

Instead, Nolan goes with the opening line of the original, as interpreted by Emily Wilson:

 

“Tell me about a complicated man.”

 

Because that is what Odysseus ultimately is, in any of the versions of the story. He is both good and evil, loyal and faithless, cruel and kind, humble and arrogant, honest and devious. He is human in the best and the worst ways. 

 

To me, that was the heart of the movie, along with the condemnation of war and invasion. Odysseus’ complexity, his humanity, and the way his ordeals lead to the awakening of his conscience and a change in his viewpoint. 

 

Sure, that isn’t what Homer focused on - the poem is firmly rooted in Honor Culture and the glorification of war and violence. And of course, it assumes that women are subhuman and the property of men. 

 

What Nolan did with this film is to me, admirable. Nobody owns a story, particularly one that has been around for millennia. Just as King Arthur and Robin Hood and Aladdin have been told and retold and reimagined and reinvigorated, so too with the old Greek tales. And so with our sacred stories from our religious traditions. 

 

What is static belongs in a museum, and a single meaning will become stale and dated. A story draws its life from being flexible, from evolving, from containing multitudes of meaning. Nobody “owns” the meaning for The Odyssey, and there is no single “true meaning.” 

 

As with any work of art, there are better and worse versions. For me, while no movie could capture all of the nuance and detail and meaning of a book, a movie can be its own work of art containing the same basic story. 

 

This movie was not a disappointment to me, even though I can (and of course have) quibbled about specific details. It isn’t the book, and doesn’t try to be. Instead, it is a solid, entertaining, and thoughtful retelling of a classic story. 

 

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

 

***

 

One of the good things that seems to have come from the movie is that The Odyssey is apparently selling really well. If this movie leads people to seek out one of the excellent translations of Homer’s work, that is a huge plus. 

 

***

 

I should mention that I have not yet read Emily Wilson’s brutal review of the movie. I kind of figure I want to read her translation first, untainted by her vitriol. I think she made a misstep here, much like people who hate a genre of music often make when criticizing it. It is fine to say you don’t like, say, Rhianna’s style, but to decide that she is a worthless poser is to miss the point. Wilson here seems to have gone beyond “I don’t like Nolan’s take on the story” to deriding a movie that is worthy art in its own right, not a mere imitation of the book. 

 

That said, I still will be reading her translation, and will probably have an opinion about it. Because translation is an art, not a science, and her choices in translation are themselves meaningful and artistic. I probably will not agree with all of them, but may very well enjoy the overall work. We shall see.

 

***

 

The list of related books, plays, operas, and movies:

 

The Iliad by Homer - I read this in my teens, before The Odyssey, believe it or not. While it definitely has its moments, I think Homer needed an editor - too many similar deaths, and they were basically fan service for his audiences - everyone’s ancestors got a line. 

 

The Aeneid by Virgil - I read this in my 30s. Aeneas was (in the myth) a Trojan who survived and went on to found Rome. And have a torrid and tragic affair with Dido, queen of Carthage. Like The Iliad, this one is filled with the detailed deaths of everyone’s ancestors.

 

Agamemnon by Aeschylus - the aftermath of the Trojan War, when the bill comes due for Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter in exchange for favorable winds. 

 

Electricidad by Luis Alfaro and Elektra by Richard Strauss and Hugo Hofmannsthal - the next episode in the cycle of violence and revenge - Orestes avenges the murder of his father by killing his mother and her lover. 

 

Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare - a play that parallels the Iliad but topples all of the heroes, except maybe Hector. Achilles and Odysseus in particular become villains, more or less. Shakespeare makes the point long before Nolan that war is immoral and soul-destroying.

 

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller - a reimagining of the Iliad from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles’ lover. 

 

Circe by Madeline Miller - In part, a reimagining of the Odyssey from the perspective of Circe, but the book also brings in a bunch of other Greek and Roman myths. One of the best books I have read. 

 

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood - Penelope’s side of the story, a pushback against the male-centric viewpoint of the old myths. 

 

Pandora’s Jar by Natalie Haynes - a non-fiction book that takes on the misogyny of many of the old stories about women. But it also looks at the fact that all the old myths have multiple versions, with different elements and perspectives. A reminder that there is no "definitive" version of these stories. 

 

O Brother Where Art Thou? (film) - a must-see for fans of The Odyssey. It really is a fun spin on the story. 

 

Ulysses by James Joyce - I read this with a friend a couple years ago, and it was definitely an experience. One could spend a lifetime finding all of the connections to Homer’s version.