I recently read Virgil’s Aeniad and despite the super-glossy modernization by Fagles, it was a good read. Furthermore it fulfilled one of those major milestones of literature life forces on us.
Unfortunately, despite being judged the best book I had read in 2019 (to date), The Aeneid was just another violent epic full of cleaved breastbones, rolling heads, and buckets of blood and gore.
The first gory epic I read was Chanson de Roland. At a very young age I’m sure the carnage was great fun (and prepared me for Ben Vereen on Broadway years later).Since then I have read epics such as Beowulf (in Old English), the Iliad and the Odyssey, and The Lord of the Rings.
The American Taliban was a novel about a young man seeking a fuller, more spiritual life, who through a series of seemingly harmless events ends up training and presumably fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11.
