Welcome to Litsy!

Fantasy isn't really my jam but I've heard amazing things about Kuang AND this one was about books AND my partner is a fan AND I nabbed a skip-the-line audio AND we were spending 10 days hiking in the Alps so it was a perfect choice for a joint listen. I did like the bookish parts and the back stories of both Alice & Peter. The rest... Meh.

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.

You 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.”

Alice 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.

Unpopular 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.

4 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

4/5 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

#fantasy #dark #academia

Two “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.

This 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.