kyatic's reviews
934 reviews

This is one of those books that are incredibly hard to ascribe a star rating to. Did I enjoy reading it? I mean, there were bits that I enjoyed - the list of superstitions at the end of Works and Days, for example - and there were bits that I had to trudge through like I was wading through soup. Of course, much of that is because I'm coming at this text as a modern reader, used to reading fast paced novels, with nuanced characters and intricate plots. Hesiod, being very much not a modern writer, writes in a style that we've now come to find incredibly dry and quite hard going in places.

However, the influence that this work has had, both on our knowledge of Ancient Greece (specifically the beginning of Archaic Greece, given the time frame of around 750BC in which Hesiod was likely writing) and indeed on Western literature as a whole mean that it feels a little like blasphemy to give this work a low rating.

It's thanks to Theogony that we know the widely accepted canonical genealogy of the gods, including the primordial deities, the Titans and the gods of Olympus, and it's thanks to Works and Days that we have an idea of some of the more ancient civilisations of Greece, described and mythologised by Hesiod as the Golden, Silver and Bronze ages, but widely believed to refer to previous civilisations. Works and Days also gives us an invaluable insight into the daily lives of Hesiod's contemporaries, including their livelihoods, their cultural practices, their beliefs and their rituals.

It shows us too the origins of some more unsavoury cultural practices that are still with us today - it's quite clear that women do not enjoy a particularly high status, with Hesiod using the myth of Pandora in Theogony to blame women for all of mankind's ills, and expanding upon this theme in Works and Days to describe how women are a bane on men, eating food and taking up resources that men could otherwise keep for themselves. I'm not saying that we still live in a culture that views women like this, but I'm also not saying that we're not.

Despite the difficulty of rating this work, I've given it a medium 3 stars - 2 stars for the archaic readability and for the chip on my shoulder I admittedly have about Hesiod's gnawing misogyny, and 4 stars for everything else.

Not going to lie, I only read this because I was 3 books behind on my 2015 Reading Challenge and it was free on Amazon, and at 192 pages, it's a pretty short read. I'd like to say that it was a good decision on my part, but unfortunately, that would be a lie.

The premise of the book is quite interesting; as someone who likes to make the most of my commute by completing the 2015 Reading Challenge (to little success, seeing as my commute is only about 15 minutes) it appealed. In a nutshell, a dude decides to prove that a commute can be productive by writing a book solely in the time he spends on trains.

However, the execution is really lacking. Simply put, this guy hasn't really written a book on his commutes. He's just written a diary. There's no plot, no theme - nothing. Just 'today I did this' and 'here's what I think about London!' Any poor sod could do it if they spend two hours a day on trains, which this chap does.

There were a couple of good lines, and I did laugh out loud on a few occasions, but I can't for the life of me remember why. That's probably the main drawback of this book. Nothing about it is memorable. I can't even remember the name of the author.

Good idea, Andy Leeks (thank god his name is just up there) but if you want to write a book on your commutes, could you at least make it a good one?