Yann Martel

And it's basically a story of failed anger management between angry white men.

It is a quarrel between Agamemnon, the supreme commander of the Greek forces, and Achilles, their greatest fighter.

And like petulant, immature men, they squabble over a woman.

And so Achilles refuses to fight, and Agamemnon says, I don't care.

But in fact, he does, because the Greek forces start to suffer devastating losses as a result of that, until Achilles finally comes back to fight.

So it's a story about literally failed anger management.

And it surprised me when I first read it, because I thought, this is literally the West's first book.

The Greeks rediscovered writing for the second time.

They were born to write, Greeks.

And the second time, the first thing he wrote down of any length was the Iliad.

So in all the books of the Western canon, the very first one would be the Iliad.

And I thought when I read that for the first time, that it would be a monument to the greatness of the Greeks.

It would be basically saying, you know, it's great to be Greek.

You should, you know, you should be jealous and be like us.

Well, it's not at all.

It's a book about failure.

Despite it being an epic, it's actually a very intimate story about people and their mistakes, people who cannot regulate their anger and the devastating consequences.

And joking aside, it really remains contemporary because we still live in a world where anger is uncontrolled.

You don't want to eliminate anger.

It's a useful tool to motivate you to change things.