The Scar of Ulysses
I recently started to read Erich Auerbach’s classic comparative study on world literature Mimesis. It is fascinating, with how many languages and literatures the guy was familiar with.
Auerbach had been a professor at the University of Marburg and he wrote the book in Istanbul after his emigration to Turkey in 1935. In each chapter, he compares two texts of a specific era, starting with Homer and the Old Testament and ending with Virginia Woolfe’s novel To the Lighthouse. The theme of  the book is his question how reality is represented in literature during different centuries and in different cultures.
To me, the book is a series of reading recommendations of famous and more obscure authors. After finishing the second chapter, I decided that I have to read some Ammianus Marcellinus one day - as well as Trimalchio’s Dinner by Petronius.
