The Crying of Lot 49 vs The Odyssey of Homer: Which Should You Read?

The Crying of Lot 49 Thomas Pynchon · 1965 ★★★★☆ 3.8 187 pages · ≈ 3 h 28 m · Challenging

“ONE summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job”

Oedipa Maas, executor of the will of Pierce Inverarity, journeys through a bizarre underground of secret societies, jazz clubs, beatniks, and her own psyche. Readers accustomed to postmodern literature will revel in…

The Odyssey of Homer Richmond Lattimore · 2007 ★★★★☆ 3.9 374 pages · ≈ 6 h 56 m · Moderate

An English translation of the Greek epic in which Odysseus makes his long and treacherous journey home after the Trojan War, while his son Telemachos and wife Penelope are forced to scheme to protect his throne until…