world: greece | From the Heart of Europe

This week should have been Togo, but I have decided arbitrarily to swap it and Greece which would have been next week.

See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Greece.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Song of Achilles	Madeline Miller	2,042,176	19,326	373,920
The Odyssey	Homer	1,207,320	61,067	88,675
Oedipus Rex	Sophocles	239,352	7,452	25,429
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold	Stephen Fry	166,904	5,043	34,202
Antigone	Sophocles	178,998	6,383	22,204
Ariadne	Jennifer Saint	149,260	3,264	44,198
The Penelopiad	Margaret Atwood	89,778	6,517	21,234
Mythology	Edith Hamilton	60,337	17,020	8,477

All of these are ancient Greek legends, or adaptations of them.

When I did this exercise in 2015, The Odyssey was far ahead of the field, so I was really surprised to see that it has now been beaten (on Goodreads and StoryGraph at least) by Madeleine Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which was published in 2012 but apparently got a major boost through BookTok in 2021.

In 2015, Oedipus Rex was second and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which is set in the twentieth century, third. More recent adaptations of the ancient myths have clearly been selling well. Stephen Fry’s Mythos was published in 2017 and Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne in 2021 (though Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad came out in 2005).

I disqualified four books which might be considered to have strong Greek content. Circe by Madeline Miller is mostly set on the island of Aiaia, which most people (including I think Miller) locate near Italy. The setting of The Iliad by Homer is mostly today’s Türkiye. None of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is set in today’s Greece. And The Republic by Plato describes an ideal state which is definitely not Greece.

Including the StoryGraph numbers brought Margaret Atwood and Edith Hamilton onto the list, and knocked off Sophocles’ Theban cycle considered as a whole and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

Women writers have done well on my list this week, but Greek women have not (with the caveat that we don’t know much about Homer). The top Greek woman writer that I found was Sappho, quite a long way down, followed by Margarita Liberaki.

Next up is Togo, then Israel, then back to Europe for Hungary and Austria.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

We ate breakfast out in the garden, under the small tangerine-trees. The sky was fresh and shining, not yet the fierce blue of noon, but a clear milky opal. The flowers were half-asleep, roses dew-crumpled, marigolds still tightly shut. Breakfast was, on the whole, a leisurely and silent meal, for no member of the family was very talkative at that hour. By the end of the meal the influence of the coffee, toast, and eggs made itself felt, and we started to revive, to tell each other what we intended to do, why we intended to do it, and then argue earnestly as to whether each had made a wise decision. I never joined in these discussions, for I knew perfectly well what I intended to do, and would concentrate on finishing my food as rapidly as possible.

As a teenager, I read several of Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical notes on collecting animals in Africa with great interest and enthusiasm. Nowadays I’m not so sure about the ethics of bringing animals out of their home environments, to which they are well adapted, to be gawked at by Europeans in cages. I’m sure that there are good arguments to be made on both sides.

Anyway, this is the story of Durrell’s childhood on the island of Corfu, as the youngest of a large family who settled there in the 1930s. He was already a keen collector of animals, and clearly drove his eccentric relatives mad with the inevitable domestic accidents that took place. But it’s a very affectionate portrait of an untroubled childhood, even if it leans a little too much on the funny foreigners that happen to live in foreign parts. You can get it here.

This was both my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired last year. Next on those piles are A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford, and The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman.

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Tag Archives: world: greece

The best known books set in each country: Greece

My Family And Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell