Circe

After seeing Circe as the Goodread readers choice for best fantasy book of 2018, I knew I would need to check it out. The story itself follows Circe, a Greek goddess, nymph, and daughter of Helios. The prose is also striking. Each scene feels epic in nature somehow – partially from prose, but also because they're populated with familiar characters - Charybdis, Odysseus, Daedalus and too many others to name.

If you have an interest in Greek Mythology you will enjoy Circe immensely. Madeline Miller knows here classics and weaves a tale of many different gods and men together into something completely new and original while staying true to the characters. It's a retelling of the same history, but from a new point of view – shedding light on areas often passed over. If you're interested in Greek Mythology, you will likely love this one as much as I did.

My bestie recommended this back to me when it came out, and I have no idea why I didn't just read it immediately! She and I are literary "twin flames" (thanks, Megan Fox, for the parlance), so she was 100% accurate in her educated guess I would love this. 10/10; no notes. Read the last third really slowly because I didn't want it to end!! Epic, intimate, searing.

I don't think this quote from the final pages can be captured in its full glory out of context, but it was rattling around in my head for days afterward and came up in another book club when someone was talking about the tightrope between nihilistic despair and hope: "A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations.... How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom?.... Circe, he says, it will be alright.... He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive."

Circe is best known for turning Odysseus's men into pigs when they landed on her island on their journey back from the Trojan War, and then being persuaded by Odysseus to change them back again. She was the daughter of the Titan Helios and a nymph in Greek mythology. She fell in love with a mortal sailor, Glaucus, and turned a fellow nymph, Scylla, into a sea monster (who also appears in the Odyssey), out of jealousy. Madeline Miller's book is a retelling of Circe's story from the point of view of Circe herself.

I've often wondered why the stories of the Greek gods always portray them as so invested in mortals— not only invested in what mortals are doing in general, but often having favorites among mortals, as Odysseus was a favorite of Athena's. This book offers an answer I hadn't thought of, as it looks at an immortal woman's struggle to grow and make a satisfactory life for herself. Mortals have something that the gods don't: an arc of story, rather than a continuous line of episodes following each other without end. On one hand, since it's us mortals telling the story, we may just be consoling ourselves that even though we have to die, we've really got the better deal. On the other hand, it's interesting. Does an immortal life have meaning?