Jaidip

    my odyssey

    What it means to actually know something again.

    14 books on the path · synced with reading

    I've been thinking about this for a long time.

    It started small. I'd share a good song with a friend, and it would sit there, unheard, buried under whatever else was competing for their attention that day. I'd recommend a book, a film, and it would land on a list — a watchlist, a reading list — and stay there. Not rejected. Just… parked. Forever "later."

    And then I noticed the same thing happening to me.

    We've turned into people who can't sit through an hour-long podcast without checking the time, without wondering if there's a faster way — a summary, a clip, fifteen minutes instead of one hour, the highlights instead of the thing itself. Meanwhile we'll happily lose four hours to reels without even noticing they're gone. We've stopped valuing the pause. The breath between one thought and the next. The moment before you speak, where you actually think about what you're about to say instead of just saying it.

    Our knowledge is starting to look like the world that's producing it: flat, fast, and wide instead of deep. We do things for the sake of doing them. We listen for the sake of having an answer ready. We know things for the sake of knowing them — not because they moved us, but because not knowing them felt embarrassing. Somewhere along the way we adopted ignorance is bliss as an actual philosophy, and started tuning out the very things that were supposed to matter to us.

    And the evidence is sitting right there in my lists. The watchlist grows. The reading list grows. What I actually know, deeply, the way you know something you've sat with for a long time — that's shrinking.

    So I want to do the opposite of all that, on purpose, with one thing.

    How this started

    I watched The Odyssey recently, and it nagged at me afterward in a way I didn't expect. We always get this story from Odysseus's side. The clever man, the long way home, the monsters he outwits, the gods he negotiates with. But there's a whole world of people standing just outside that frame — Penelope, waiting for twenty years while the story assumes she's simply waiting. The women taken as spoils of a war they had no say in. The witches and monsters who exist in the myth mostly as obstacles for a man to get past.

    I shared a post with a friend about the retellings — books written from Penelope's point of view, from the women's point of view — and somewhere in that conversation, it clicked. I didn't just want to read the Odyssey again. I wanted to actually master it. The characters, the creatures, the politics of it, the war that came before it, the different eyes it's been seen through since. Not a summary. Not a highlight reel. The real thing, slowly, from more than one angle.

    This is me trying to relearn what it feels like to sit with something instead of skimming past it.

    Where I'm starting

    Here's the shape of the project so far — the books I'm working through, roughly in the order I think makes sense, though I imagine that'll shift as I go:

    Where this goes

    I don't know exactly how far I'll take this. Maybe it stays a reading project. Maybe it turns into something I write more seriously about — the war, the myth, the way the same story keeps getting handed to new narrators who were standing there the whole time and never got to speak.

    For now, I'm just starting with Fry's Mythos, and I'll update this page whenever there's something worth sharing — a book finished, a character I didn't expect to care about, a thread between two retellings I didn't see coming.

    Let's see how far I get.

    This is my Odyssey.