'One Big Book' doesn't seem like much
- Joanne Jacobs
- Jan 6
- 2 min read
I first encountered Homer's Odyssey in Junior Great Books when I was in middle school. I remember how much I liked wily Odysseus. We read both The Iliad and The Odyssey in my 12th-grade Great Books class. (Thank you, Miss Anderson!) We read plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes too.
These days, colleges are offering English courses that require students to read "One Big Book That's Worth It" in a semester, writes Rikki Schlott in a New York Post column arguing that colleges are coddling students. Books are typically classics that students used to read in high school in my day.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, students can choose The Odyssey as their "big book" for Spring 2026. “This course guides students slowly and carefully through one extraordinary long book that is well worth the time and effort,” the catalogue listing reads. Eliot's Middlemarch -- it is long -- was an earlier choice.
Fordham University and Smith College also offer English courses called “One Big Book," writes Schlott. Smith has assigned Ellison's Invisible Man (read it in 11th grade) in the past. Penn students may read Moby-Dick or Shakespeare’s Richard III.
In Boston, Suffolk University’s honors college promises to divide "the long book into manageable weekly readings,” she notes. "It wasn’t long ago that students were expected to read a big book in a few weeks. . . . now, in the age of iPhones and diminished attention spans, we’re acting like it’s a feat to get through a single book in half a school year."
Of course, students are doing "deep reading" of their one book. But I think "deep reading" sometimes means "let's beat it to death." Couldn't they read two or three books in a semester and get some context?
By the way, let me recommend Ferdia Lennon's Glorious Exploits, a funny and moving account of two unemployed Syracusan potters using Athenian POWs to stage Euripides' Medea and Trojan Women after the failed Athenian invasion of Sicily in 412 BCE. It's based on a story from Plutarch, who says some Athenians, starving in the quarries after their surrender, were given food, water and sometimes freedom if they could recite lines from Euripides to their drama-starved captors.
I love all of Mary Renault's Greek books, but The Last of the Wine is probably the best. The main character's father is a prisoner in the quarries in Syracuse.
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey comes out this summer.
Yes, novels by Mary Renault! A very enjoyable way to feel immersed in some aspects of the world(s) of ancient Greece.
So glad I grew up on Greek myths (first the D'Aulaires, later Edith Hamilton) and Herodotus in translation, long before taking Latin in high school and eventually majoring in Classics in college.
If it's really impossible for today's 'college' students to read works of literature (more than "one big book" a semester--and why would Richard III count?), they should at least hear, from time to time, that in the not-so-distant past, it was quite normal for college students at their institution to read a heck of a lot more.
We used to read more than one big book each year AND beat them to death. That, to me, was the worst part about reading for school.
My dad made me read another one big book during the summer and write a book report on it. That was actually OK as I got to pick my book and didn't have to discuss it at length.
If I were assigning a book that had a movie made from it, I'd carefully watch and read, and figure out several questions to ask where the two diverged, just to make sure they actually read it.
Thucydides 3.82-84 is a passage that partisans of all stripes should reflect on.
Have you read Thucydides? His account of the Athenian expedition in Syracuse is some of the most moving classical writing I know, and is the basis for the pop classics you recommend above.