The Odyssey by Homer Ulysses by James Joyce Joyce's intention was to create a fictional Everyman-- Leopold Bloom-- to rival the classical figure of Homer's Odysseus, which Joyce admired as the most well-rounded portrait of a human in literature. But he took the tribute a step further by making Bloom's adventures parallel Ulysses's, on a much smaller scale. Saga of Hope, An Icelandic Odyssey a Scattering of Seeds - The Creation of Canada Saga of Hope is an exploration of the Icelandic heritage of distant cousins Juliann Blackmore and Asthildur Kjartansdottir. Their ancestor, Sigursteinn Oddson, left Iceland in 1883. His neighbour, Hans Peter Tergesen, left in 1887. The two men were part of a massive exodus from Iceland to Canada. A devastating volcano drove one-third of the population from their island home. The majority went to a settlement in Manitoba, named "New Iceland." O Brother Where Art Thou by The Cohen Brothers In a Homerian epic meets Preston Sturges comedy, three prison chain gang escapees are on the lam in Depression-era Mississippi. Throughout their odyssey, they encounter a cyclops (an ominous, eye-patch-wearing salesman), numerous sirens, and a rogue claiming to have compacted with the Devil to trade his soul for mastery of the Delta blues guitar. This edition emphasizes the text and offers very little in the way of camera shots, angles, and points of view. The Coens' ever-broadening fan base should make this popular in all film collections. 2001: A Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick The fantastic journey is not merely a space exploration cautioning against the advent of artificial perfection through technology, but is a complex metaphor regarding human exploration through the dark depths of the human soul in search of spiritual progression.

Cold Mountain Author: Charles Frazier Inman is Odysseus, journeying home, facing tribulations and temptations; Ada is Penelope, fending off suitors and freeloaders, keeping faith and waiting. What drives Cold Mountain is a longing for something entirely elusive, possibly nonexistent: a relationship that exists in the imagination, that has no tangible history. Last Samurai Author: Helen DeWitt An intellectual tour-de-force, playful, multi-layered, but wonderfully readable, The Last Samurai is full of stories of remarkable exploits, tables of Japanese grammar, snatches of Greek poetry, passages of Icelandic legend, and ingenious math problems. But it also has a rare emotional depth, as the little boy's search for a father, or even a man heroic enough to be his father, gradually reveals a new and unexpected dimension of love. And at the book's heart is the relationship between Sibylla and Ludo, which is moving and oddly memorable in its fusion of solidarity, frustration, and tenderness. The Master Butchers Singing Club Author: Louise Erdrich Erdrich's Odysseus, the German sniper Fidelis Waldvogel, takes only 12 days to walk home from his war (the Great War). Eva, the woman Fidelis comes home to wed, has not been waiting faithfully for him, but for his best friend Johannes, whose child she carries, and whose death in the war Fidelis must now report to her. With this dark homecoming in 1918, the odyssey really begins. Hoping to make a new life with his grieving bride, Fidelis makes the naive attempt to trace a piece of American bread—whose manufactured perfection astonishes him—back to its source. Fidelis gets as far as Argus, North Dakota, a place so culturally distant from Germany (and so remote from anywhere) that he must start his life almost from scratch.