The Song of Achilles (2011)

Distraught. A heaping mess of sobs. This book is just too much. The description is perfection. I felt transported to Ancient Greece. The sights, the sounds, the colors... it was all so vivid all I can think of is eating figs and crying because FIGS. The characters were so human, so flawed yet so wonderful. I feel like all I can do right now is gush and also rush to the nearest bookstore to look for a hardcover edition just so I can hug it at night.

Read it, you won't be sorry. ( )

I only picked this up because I saw one of my friends on here talk about it a lot and they seemed to have really loved it, so I just thought 'why not'. I was kind of hesitant because it's not really my genre, I don't usually read mythology, but when I read the first sentence it sucked me in. I just could not put it down.
I absolutely adored the writing style, it was raw and beautiful and appropriate for a book like this. The entire book is just so quotable, and the fact that it's written in first person is one of my favourite things about it, because mythological books are almost never in first person. I could rave about the writing style all day, it's just so brilliant, even reading the quotes on the goodreads page makes my heart ache. Just the writing makes it absolutely worth reading.
I fell in love with Achilles and Patroclus and even the side characters, they all felt very real, and, being one of the few people who have never read the Iliad I appreciated the details and the character glossary at the end. What I loved most about it was the love between Achilles and Patroclus. I can see why some people might not like it but it was what made me devour the entire book in a few days.
Although it got a bit slow during the second half, it was never boring and it actually brought me to tears a few times. It was so amazing that I could talk about it all day and, even though I just finished it I would quite like to re-read it. Right now.
All I can say is that it is an incredible book. ( )

I loved listening to this audiobook. A classic story beautifully written. I hope Madeline Miller has more for us. ( )

This is a pretty amazing retelling of the Iliad. It was interesting to see things from Patroclus's point of view. And I surprisingly learned a few things that I hadn't already known from other versions of this story. This was by far the best one! ( )

The song of Achilles could be pitched as a biography of Patroklos. It predominantly deals with the relationship between Achilles, greatest of the Achaeans, and Patroklos, his lover and brother-in-arms (but mainly the former).

There were lots of things that this book did right. For one, it was well-written, with a language and style that kept a neat middle between the requirements of contemporary prose and the sense of a three-thousand-plus year old tale. It’s also a complete story, in that it not only retells the Trojan War, but all the semi-mythic material before and after that is needed to properly complete the story. For all that, it’s well-paced: the bits that could drag are given enough charm or interest of their own that they don’t, and the bits that shouldn’t drag, don’t.

What I particularly liked about this book, though, is that Miller made the whole thing feel downright crisp: the choice of side-character like Patroklos as main character forces a judicious selection from well-known material, but it also brings a fresh perspective on the whole mythological cycle. As a result, neither feels constraining, and the story seems almost new.

The song of Achilles engaged me from about the second chapter in, and kept me committed until the very end. Not bad at all! ( )