A Book Club That Actually Worked: What UC Berkeley Stumbled Into

By Andy — 2026-07-13 — classic fiction recommendations

UC Berkeley launched a quiet online book club on Homer's Odyssey. Fifteen hundred people signed up from around the world.

The Arts and Humanities division there wasn't trying to change anything. They just wanted to run a biweekly Zoom series—two hours a week, more or less, with graduate students and faculty from the Ancient Greek programme walking people through Daniel Mendelsohn's new translation. Standard alumni outreach. The kind of thing universities do all the time, and mostly nobody notices.

Then the numbers came in.

I don't mean they were decent. They were genuinely strange. Fifteen hundred people from across the globe. From what I can tell, the original plan was hoping for maybe a hundred. Two hundred if things went well. You can imagine the emails that followed—the slightly panicked ones, the ones trying to work out what happened.

The obvious thing: Christopher Nolan is making a film. The Odyssey comes out in July 2026 with Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and a cast so large it probably has its own catering budget. Tom Holland is in it. Robert Pattinson is in it. Zendaya, Lupita Nyong'o—the whole arrangement.

Berkeley clearly bet that a blockbuster could do what university syllabi mostly fail at: make a 2,700-year-old story feel like something you actually want to spend time on. They were right about that.

But here's the thing that matters more than the numbers. The people weren't local. They weren't Berkeley alumni showing up out of institutional loyalty. Actually, no—a lot of them probably were alumni, but the point is that thousands of them weren't. People in Mumbai signed up. People in Lagos. People in small towns in Australia who'd somehow heard about a Zoom meeting on ancient Greek poetry happening at 5:30am their time.

That's not obvious.

The club itself is straightforward. One section of the Odyssey per session. A different expert hosting each time—Duncan MacRae from Ancient Greek and Roman Studies cycles through, along with others. Cecily Manson, a graduate student, holds the thing together. They're using Mendelsohn's translation from the University of Chicago Press, 2025, the one that doesn't smooth anything out. Keeps the meter. Keeps the strange bits strange. His idea is that a contemporary reader can get that déjà vu feeling—oh, I know this story—and still hit walls of incomprehension, just like Odysseus did when he kept washing ashore in impossible places.

The format is tight. One hour. Biweekly. No messy expansions.

What strikes me isn't really the size of the crowd, though that's the number that made it into the conversation. It's that nobody predicted the appetite. Universities spend enormous energy trying to stay relevant, trying to convince people that dusty subjects matter, that a 500-page epic in translation is worth your Tuesday night. Berkeley didn't really try very hard. They just put the thing on and got out of the way. The content did what content does when you pair it with serious people who've actually read it.

Nolan's film is obviously the accelerant. A major release from the director of Oppenheimer built around one of the foundation texts of Western literature moves something from assignment to event. From "I should probably" to "I actually want to see what this is about."

But Berkeley added something the film can't provide. The chance to actually read it. Slowly. With people who've spent their careers on it. To ask questions that a three-hour film won't answer. To sit with the strange parts instead of moving past them.

That combination feels like something worth noticing. Connect serious material to a moment people already care about. Keep the doors actually open. Let it work.

Mendelsohn wrote somewhere—Free Press, I think—that the Odyssey survives not because it's old but because what it worries about doesn't age: home, who you are, whether you can trust anyone, what the journey costs you. Those are current anxieties. Still are. The film opens July 17. The book club ran to a full house.

Tags: Daniel Mendelsohn, UC Berkeley, Christopher Nolan, Mendelsohn Odyssey translation 2026, Nolan Odyssey film July 2026, UC Berkeley alumni book club Homer