Short answer: if you want the real thing, start with Homer's Odyssey in a translation you enjoy reading aloud, and keep our beginner's guide to the Odyssey next to it. If you want one book that explains the whole Greek system, pick Edith Hamilton's Mythology for the textbook version or Stephen Fry's Mythos for the storyteller's. If you are after the Norse material, Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology is the friendliest door. Below, the shelf is sorted by what you actually want, not by rank.
If you want the primary sources
| Book | Author | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Iliad | Homer | The Trojan War at its most human: rage, grief, one long funeral. |
| Odyssey | Homer | The best first classic. A shape everyone already half knows. |
| Theogony | Hesiod | Where the gods come from, in order. The family tree in verse. |
| Works and Days | Hesiod | Pandora, the ages of man, and farming advice in the same breath. |
| Metamorphoses | Ovid | The single richest source for the myths as we retell them today. |
| Aeneid | Virgil | Troy's survivors and Rome's founding myth, written with purpose. |
| Poetic Edda | Anonymous | The Norse myths raw, in the voices of the poems themselves. |
| Prose Edda | Snorri Sturluson | The same myths organised and explained, arcs intact. |
| Epic of Gilgamesh | Anonymous | The oldest surviving great story: friendship, and dying. |
| Book of the Dead | Anonymous | Egyptian funerary spells, not a narrative. A window, not a novel. |
One thing matters more here than which title you choose: the translation. A verse translation and a prose translation of the same poem feel like two different books. Verse keeps the music and the strangeness, and asks for more attention. Prose reads like a novel and moves fast. Neither is more correct. Before buying, read the first page of two or three editions and buy the one whose voice you would not put down. That single decision explains most abandoned copies of the Iliad.
If you want one book that explains everything
| Book | Author | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Mythology | Edith Hamilton | The school standard: clear, complete, dated in places. |
| The Greek Myths | Robert Graves | Encyclopedic coverage of variants, unmatched as a reference. |
| Mythos (and its sequels) | Stephen Fry | Warm, funny, the easiest read on the whole shelf. |
| Norse Mythology | Neil Gaiman | The Norse stories told simply and beautifully. |
| The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Joseph Campbell | Seeing how storytellers use myth. |
Two honest warnings. Graves is a superb collector and an unreliable interpreter: his theory of a single prehistoric goddess cult behind the myths is not accepted by scholars, so read the retellings and treat the commentary as one man's argument. Campbell's monomyth reshaped screenwriting more than it reshaped classics; specialists have long criticised it for flattening very different cultures into one template. Read it for how stories work, not as a description of what these cultures believed.
If you want a novel
| Book | Author | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Circe | Madeline Miller | The best entry point of the modern wave. A whole life, beautifully done. |
| The Song of Achilles | Madeline Miller | The Iliad as a love story, from Patroclus' side. |
| The Silence of the Girls | Pat Barker | Troy from the enslaved women's perspective. Unsparing. |
| A Thousand Ships | Natalie Haynes | The entire war told by the women in it. |
| The Penelopiad | Margaret Atwood | Short, sharp, and very funny about the ending of the Odyssey. |
| Percy Jackson series | Rick Riordan | Younger readers, and adults who want pure fun. |
If you are buying for a child
| Book | Author | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths | Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire | Ages 6 and up. The illustrated classic, still unbeaten. |
| Percy Jackson and the Olympians | Rick Riordan | Ages 9 and up. Turns reluctant readers into readers. |
Riordan invents plenty, but the mythology underneath is largely sound: we untangled what is real and what he made up. For younger children, our Greek myths for kids guide lists which stories work at which age.
Quick questions
What is the best book to start with?
Hamilton if you want the map, Fry if you want the voice, Miller's Circe if you would rather be told a story than taught a subject. Any of the three will send you to Homer afterwards, which is the point.
Should I read Homer in verse or prose?
Verse if you can give it your attention: the rhythm is a large part of what the poem is. Prose if you mainly want the story and want to finish it. Read a page of each before deciding, and ignore anyone who says the other choice is cheating.
What is the best Norse mythology book?
Start with Gaiman's Norse Mythology, then read Snorri's Prose Edda, then the Poetic Edda. In that order it feels like three chapters of the same education. Reversed, most people stop on page ten.
Books are one way in. Audio is another, and it is the older one: these stories were spoken long before anyone wrote them down. MythologyNow narrates the myths like short films, with voices and score, so you can meet the gods on a commute and read them properly later. Start with any episode.
