I never thought this day would come, but today, I‘m starting my #Christmas Holidays! These are my reading plans until New Year‘s Eve.
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I never thought this day would come, but today, I‘m starting my #Christmas Holidays! These are my reading plans until New Year‘s Eve.
pickYou know, I *really* enjoyed this one, even if I didn‘t think it was *quite* perfect. I loved the nerdy magical history discourse, and I thought it all went how it should. There was a little bit of a slow patch around the 75% mark, but… maybe to be expected in a novel this length. 🤓
Now listening to Carl and the audio is (so far) fanTAStic.
Also @AmyG I received this package from you! Is this #jolabokaflodswap? So excited!! 🎄🍫📖♥️
“This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional.”
pickAlice Law, a postgraduate at Cambridge studying analytic Magick, decides to journey to Hell to retrieve her advisor, the brilliant and toxic Jacob Grimes. She is willing to pay a high price, but as she travels deeper into the realms of the underworld it becomes clear that she's already endured an incredible amount of pressure and self-imposed punishment just to follow her ambitions. Dark academia at its darkest and most academic. Loved it.
so-soUnpopular opinion:
I have mixed feelings. The book is very dark academia oriented, but I found the characters unlikeable, and Hell had a lot of boring moments. I wanted a scary, richly detailed, demonic Hell. This is not that, but it did make the professors look like monsters. It struck me as a little pretentious. I will have to sit with it for awhile.
pick4 Stars • R.F. Kuang‘s Katabasis (2025): Two rival Cambridge PhD students in analytic magick descend into a bleak, bureaucratic Hell to rescue their abusive mentor‘s soul after he dies without writing Alice‘s recommendation letter. A sharp, Dante-inspired satire of toxic academia, ambition, and self-destruction.
#Katabasis #RKuang #Bookish #suvataReads
so-soTwo “rival” graduate students descend into hell to rescue their advisor in order to get their letters of recommendation. Although I really liked the concept and found some of the pieces of academia very accurate, it took me forever to finish it and I realized that I just wasn‘t that excited to read it. I did find several parts pretty funny and I liked the literary references but it dragged a bit too much.
pickThis novel is weird and funny and original. I love the alternate-universe Cambridge and how Kuang incorporates different mythologies and literary traditions into the way Hell is built and how it operates. I also really enjoyed the relationship between Alice and her rival, Peter.
pickWhat began as a rescue mission in Hades turned into a story of finding the meaning of life while trekking through Hell and throwing in the most epic revenge tale since Edgar Allen Poe. A four-and-a-half star read only because I‘ve started rating R.F. Kuang novels compared to other R.F. Kuang novels
