Literary Pick (*)

The Aeneid

-Virgil

I'm so glad to finally be over with this book. It seems that any book I look passionately forward to reading turns out to be a dud. I was really looking to recapture the emotions I felt reading  Homer's The Odyssey, but instead I was left feeling the opposite..very much the way I felt reading Homer's The Iliad, which was absolutely torturous for me.

It started off interesting enough.. Aeneas wakes up to see his city being ravaged by the Greeks. Aeneas tries to flee with his family, but realizes his wife, Creusa, is not with him, so he returns for her and instead encounters her ghost..she's been killed. I thought that was wonderful start to the story, however, after he leaves Troy, it goes downhill from there. Aside from the part where he takes up with Dido, It felt like I was reading the Iliad all over again with it's never-ending war theme. Almost the entire rest of the story was about his battle with Turnus. Every single page was pure labor. I hate when I don't enjoy a beautiful classic like this. It makes me feel inadequate.