Welcome to Litsy!

I didn't mean to sound like I hadn't found new things to read in the #tob2025 longlist! Above the line are books that have been on and off my monthly tbr stacks all year and which I'll now try harder to fit in, and below the line are books newly on my radar 🥰 I can't believe I missed the newest Rivers Solomon!

Love this. Bumblers into heroes arc, beautiful prose, beautifully paced. Set in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War, but laced with Irish jargon and a stripped-down setting of quarries & markets for a sense of timelessness near the “wine-dark” sea. Brutality & art. Preservation of culture. Entertaining the enemy. Funny & sentimental. Crazy premise (stage Medea with actors now prisoners of war) becomes a beautiful mediation on art & freedom. 2024

#bookhaul 😁

It's won awards & everyone is raving about it - so it was fairly obvious I wouldn't rate it! (Seriously, why IS it always me?!) The Irish voice is irritating, a gratuitous gimmick for the sake of novelty, a cheap "unique selling point". Lampo is initially such an unpleasant character it's hard to warm to him during his redemption. I found the writing stodgy & the pace draggy. It wasn't as witty as it thought it was. It gets better at the end.

During the Greek economic crisis that started in 2009, someone takes it upon themselves to blackmail rich tax evaders into paying their taxes or face death. Victims are left to be discovered in various archaeological sites, including Kerameikos (pic from Wikipedia). Police chief Kostas Charitos is on the case, but things turn political and popular sentiment is on the vigilante‘s side.
I never quite got into this novel, but it was a quick read.

This was a good balance of funny and horrific, the narrator Lampo both a tragic hero and a bumbling fool. The tone was perhaps a bit too modern, Lampo sounded like an Irishman, but in a way it added to the sense of theatre. (Who knows what a potter in ancient Syracuse sounded like anyway?) And fortunately it is not (post-post-post?) modern in its ending. On the contrary, the final sentence makes you nod in agreement, fully satisfied with the story

Common sense is common, has no imagination, and it only works by precedent. It leaves the man who follows it poorer, if not in pocket, then in his heart. Fuck common sense.

Getting stuck into this one. First few pages didn't hook me immediately, but I'm warming to it

I thought that the methodology of this book was interesting, the author took different dialogues and plays and whatnot and used them as sources for little vignettes of moments in different people‘s day in Athens. But almost immediately there was the awkward feeling of male authors (past and present)writing women as utterly fascinated by men. The wedding procession scene in particular had me rolling my eyes.