You’ve probably seen the movie made from this book.It was a fine movie. It won Oscars.
But it cannot begin to capture the truly spectacular parts of this story because they are not the surface level narratives that make it onto the big screen.
Before you can truly appreciate the quality of this book, you need to be familiar with at least Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, and parts of the Bible. You need to be on guard for a depth of symbolism and complexity of foreshadowing and allusion that will boggle your mind.
I always knew the movie didn’t really get the book, but when my dad(who has not read the book) referred to it as "a chick flick" because he thought of it primarily as a love story(which it is, but not that kind), then I really realized what one misses when one has not read the book