Oh Homer, Where Art Thou? The Odyssey for your Favorite Classic Novel is Easier Than You Think!

As a famous storyteller from a bygone era, Graham Greene wrote many classic novels on the themes of love, good and evil, Catholic Guilt, and the nature of suicide.

Greene incorporates all his most prominent themes in a world of war and political espionage in his 1948 novel, The Heart of The Matter.

Set in British Sierra Leone during World War II, Major Henry Scobie finds himself in an adulterous situation between a lonely shipwreck survivor named Helen Rolt and his wife, Louise.

You will not find a better example of gold-standard writing than what's illustrated in The Heart of The Matter, as it's often considered the crown jewel of Greene's bibliography. Yet, months after reading the novel, I haven't been able to recommend it to a single soul.

I discovered Graham Greene when searching through my Grandma's basement and stumbling upon a box of forgotten classics, a rotting, softcover copy settled in my hands, and then later by my bedside.

Some classics grow in and out of style, and only a few remain household names. Either because Hollywood succeeds in a book adaptation once in a Blue Moon or books like "Great Expectations," "War and Peace," and "The Great Gatsby" are taught in English classrooms all across America.

Hollywood helps revive classic tales by taking a 19th-century story (i.e., Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel Little Women) and retelling it through movies and T.V. shows (i.e., Little Women, 2019).

The success of Little Women reveals the general population has an interest in classic writing, or the very least, classic stories. But as a reading enthusiast with a deep-rooted affection for classics, I cannot say they are all the same.

Classics tend to be dense and old, and therefore intimidating, especially for newer readers. Most of these books we read in school, also happen to be obnoxiously White and predominantly male.

There's a reason I'm using Graham Greene as an example. Not to bully a talented author, and Greene was notably superb, but his characters are too British and too Catholic for the good of the story.

I cannot convince myself that any novice reader would want to sympathize with a group of pious imperialists committing adultery while having the luxury to call their 30-year African servant "boy."

The heart of the matter is we tend to stigmatize classics by bunching them into two categories: modern classics (made less than 100 years ago) and "actual" classics (typically written before 1920). We are too quick to assume older books are harder to read and concern nothing relevant to our era.

However, a modern classic, such as The Heart of The Matter, won't necessarily hold as well as a book written during the Civil War. And not all classics were written by White males.

Pride and Prejudice and To Kill a Mockingbird, both written by women, feature in the two top spots on Penguin's list of 100 must-read classic books.

Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude was published as recently as 1967 yet is considered by today's standards as a modern classic.

Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, written by a Nigerian writer named Chinua Achebe, was a milestone for African authors.

Meanwhile, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is a forgotten masterpiece from the Harlem Renaissance. It reads as a tale of old Southern Gothic folklore meets coming-of-age epic through the eyes of a Black woman living in the 1930s, Florida.

Oscar Wilde tackled sensitive social issues in various works, including The Picture of Dorian Gray and his one-act play Salome, initially written in French.

I've already said how much I appreciated Giovanni's Room in a June post. But there are plenty of other LGBTQ classics like Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928).

There is so much to our world of classic literature than what meets the eye, but we have to go beyond English classrooms and Hollywood movies to find it.

Classic literature is not synonymous with "White, European, and Catholic," and classic protagonists aren't all people who look like Graham Greene.

There is a colorful and dense world of classics waiting to be rediscovered and revisited by the modern eye, but we need to go beyond English classrooms and Hollywood movies to find them.

F.Y.I

Independent bookstores are great resources for searching for your next big read.

But my general philosophy is to read everything, good and bad, and never be afraid to start with a classic.