So I was really disappointed with a lot of the myths themselves. While I've been fascinated by Greek myths for a while, I've never read about the stories themselves in great detail before, I just had a vague idea about certain characters and their stories. But I'd also rather they had a first or third person narrative, with description and dialogue, and insight into the characters' heads, so.īut there were also elements I didn't like that had nothing to do with Fry, but with the stories themselves. I kind of wish the book was longer, split into more volumes, and more detail gone into each story. and I have no idea who Y is any more or what their story involved. So it's kind of written as, Z, who is the son of Y, who was suffering the consequences of his own story (10+ stories ago).

And there are so many characters, and so many branches of this giant family tree (especially with the gods having children with multiple people - with most not consenting), it just got so confusing as to who was the child of who, and what their parent's story was. On top of this, there was also the fact that in this 464-page novel, so many myths were told, and each story, bar two or three, was pretty short, and quickly Fry would move on to another. The reading experience was more like reading non-fiction, which I have to be in the right mood for, simply because I'm not a huge fan of reading when it's just words on a page (rather than a movie in my mind). Fry's story telling wasn't something I could get lost in and let my imagination translate into a movie, like reading normally is for me. The myths are being told, so there is no real description, no real third person narration, getting inside the characters' minds, not a huge amount of dialogue - and what dialogue we did get, while funny, just wasn't very believable. And while at first, it was amusing - because it's Stephen Fry, who doesn't love Stephen Fry?! - it did kind of feel a little dry after a while. His retellings include his own commentary and footnotes (so many footnotes) of related information.

It isn't written as a collection of fictional short stories, as I was expecting, it's Fry writing as if he was there, right in front of you, telling you the stories aloud. Mythos is Fry's book of Greek myths retellings, with emphasis on telling. However, while it was interesting, it wasn't what I expected, and I felt quite disappointed. Having had my interest in the Greek myths reignited by Great Goddesses by Nikita Gill, I dived right into Mythos by Stephen Fry straight after.

Greek mythology stephen fry