Read The Odyssey by email.
You have started this book before. This time you will finish it.
Ten years after Troy fell, its cleverest survivor is still not home. Homer's epic of shipwreck and monsters, patience and disguise, and the longest homecoming in literature — the poem the whole Western storytelling tradition descends from, one short installment a day.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Seven months from now, you will have read Homer.
199 installments, one an email
- First published
- c. 700 BC
- Translation
- Butler
- Installments
- 199
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 117,282
- Reading time
- 8 hours 9 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 3 months
- At 10 minutes a day
- 7 weeks
- At 20 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read The Odyssey?
The Odyssey is the original adventure serial: a hero introduced by reputation before he ever appears, a story told out of order through flashback, a household under siege waiting at home, and an audience kept hungry across twenty-four books. It was composed for episodic performance — a singer, a fire, one stretch of the story a night — which makes daily email closer to its native format than any printed edition.
Everything is here already: the Cyclops and the Sirens, Circe and Calypso, the descent to the dead, the bow only one man can string. But the poem's real subject is a marriage — the twenty-year patience of Penelope, who runs her own campaign of delay at home, and a reunion scene that four thousand years of literature has never bettered.
We serialize Samuel Butler's classic prose translation — plain, fast, and novelistic, the version that reads least like homework. Butler uses the Roman names (Ulysses, Minerva, Jove); each installment breaks inside a single book of the poem, with a “Previously” recap so the thread never drops.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read The Odyssey?
About eight and a half hours straight through (117,282 words). By email, it's 199 daily installments of 2–3 minutes each — finished in about six and a half months.
Is this the version the Christopher Nolan film is based on?
The film draws on the same poem — there is only one Odyssey. We serialize Samuel Butler's public-domain prose translation. If the movie made you want to finally read the real thing, this is the lowest-effort way to actually do it.
Why does it say Ulysses instead of Odysseus?
Butler, like most Victorian translators, uses the Roman forms of the names: Ulysses for Odysseus, Minerva for Athena, Jove for Zeus, Neptune for Poseidon. The story is identical; you'll stop noticing within a week.
Is a 2,700-year-old poem hard to read?
Not in this form. Butler translated it as plain prose on the theory that it's a page-turner, and he was right — his Odyssey reads like an adventure novel. There's no verse to scan and no apparatus to consult.
Do I need to read the Iliad first?
No. The Odyssey recaps what it needs from the Trojan War as it goes — it was composed for audiences hearing it fresh. If you love it, the Iliad makes a natural next serial.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Samuel Butler translation (1898), from Wikisource, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.