Core Book

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Core Book Bookmark VerticalWhat is Core Book?

Each year, the College selects a "core book." This book is chosen because it embodies and illuminates important themes of Wheaton's Christ at the Core general education curriculum. Throughout the year, we read, discuss, reflect, and learn together about the book and its themes. Our faculty, students, and staff work together to create materials to accompany readers. And we host Core Book events such as scholarly lectures, panel discussions, theatrical performances, film showings, reading groups, concerts, and more.

Core Book Bookmark VerticalWho Reads the Core Book? 

Everyone! All students, faculty, and staff are invited to participate in the conversation. We also invite local community members as well as the wider public to take advantage of Core Book resources and events. The Core Book program fosters a shared experience across the Wheaton community and beyond as we read, reflect upon, and discuss the book together. 

Core Book 2024-2025 The Odyssey

Why The Odyssey?

core book main graphic bannerHomer’s Odyssey, epic in more ways than one, has been justly acclaimed through thousands of years of literary tradition as a source and touchstone for world literature. It’s also simply a romping good story, endlessly entertaining and endlessly generative for stories told everywhere, kitchen tables to college classrooms. Set in a time and place far from us, the story no less inspires our own connections to characters (and criticism of them!), as well helping us ask our perennial questions. Reading The Odyssey allows us to think about suffering, ethics, theology, hospitality, friendship, parent-child relationships, marriage, death, honor, and the foundations of a good, stable society. Reading the text together and allowing ourselves to soak in its stories will yield not only such questions and conversations, but also new tales, poems, dances, paintings, talks, ideas, jokesif we join in the journey.

 

Core Book Bookmark VerticalGet Involved

All are invited to join the Wheaton community in fall 2024 as we read, discuss, and learn together from Homer's Odyssey. Here’s how you can get involved:

Core Book Events

Choose a Translation

We have deliberately not recommended a specific translation of The Odyssey for Core Book, but instead invite our community to read it in manifold translations, languages, and forms. The Odyssey pre-existed its being written down and has been retold and reimagined in countless ways. We invite you, as a fellow reader and reimaginer, to choose. Possibly you will consider a recent translation, such as that of Emily Wilson, or you might check out the translation that first inspired Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” You might look at a translation in your first language, or in the ancient Greek. Whichever version of Odysseus’s journey you choose, our goal, as Robert Fagles implores in his own translation, is to experience the glory of this epic poem, and allow it to “sing for our time too.”

Engage with the Podcast

core book podcast logoThe Wheaton College community has developed a variety of resources for use, whether engaged with in group settings, or used for personal consideration. Access and download them for free. 

Odyssey - Episode 1: Find the Beginning 

Learn By Listening

Starting October 4, listen to the first season of the Core Book Podcast! Set sail on a 10-episode journey with Wheaton faculty members Dr. Tiffany Eberle Kriner (English), Dr. Alexander Loney (Modern and Classical Languages), and Dr. Benjamin Weber as they work their way through the epic in four-book chunks. The podcast is designed and edited and produced--with significant content contributions—by Wheaton College Aequitas Fellows in the Public Humanities and Arts. Each episode will contain a Sassy Summary of Odyssey books under consideration (written by Wheaton students!), a conversation between the faculty members, and news about Odyssey-inspired materials from pop culture


Share the Love

If you love The Odyssey and these amazing resources, why not share them with your friends?

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View the Core Book Archives

Explore the archives to learn more about past Core Book selections. You'll find helpful reading guides, contextual information, articles, and additional resources developed by Wheaton College faculty to enhance your reading experience.