A review by bookedbymadeline
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by Stephen Fry

informative slow-paced

3.0

I’ll start off by saying Mythos was an interesting read but kind of overwhelming or annoying at times.

The first part was the worst as I had trouble wanting to read it with the overwhelm of facts. As another reviewer put it, and I can’t word it any better myself, it was like reading a Wikipedia entry!! It’s so much information being thrown at you in a straightforward way (which is fine), but it got tedious and boring at times. I had to set it aside multiple times and focused on other books instead. And when it’s not info overload, Fry uses so much alliteration I began skimming. It was like he was trying to reach the word count by adding in as many adjectives possible 😬

This book is categorized as fiction so I think I was expecting more depth and better story flow. But it’s a lot of who’s who and who hated who without a real story/long lasting impact. But then when it was more of the storytelling writing I was looking for, the irritating amount of adjectives came in (Stephen I don’t need a run on sentence giving all the synonyms for sad) 🙈

Writing especially the dialogue can be a bit much-I will just never understand British humor 🙈 I cringed at the parts that I think were meant to be funny?

The last two parts were much better! Part one did have new info that I didn’t know about so I did appreciate that. The writing was just so dry and mainly an info dump. Once we get to parts 2 and 3 with the “lesser” gods and mortals (Persephone, Eros and Psyche, etc) it flowed much better and was an easier/more enjoyable read for the most part!

I own the other two books in the trilogy already and loved hearing Stephen Fry do a reading for Troy so I pushed myself through. Partially glad that I did but by the end I was so over it 😂 I’m hoping what I’ve seen from other reviewers is correct in that Heroes is way better than Mythos! 🙈

If you know nothing or very little about Greek myths then I’d recommend this for the pure amount of info you’ll get on the gods and background stories. You may enjoy this if you love Greek mythology too, I love the topic but sadly this one didn’t do it for me but I know others enjoyed it. 
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