Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is now currently being hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

Farewell Anatolia by Dido Sotiriou

Blurb from Goodreads

Farewell Anatolia is a tale of paradise lost and of shattered innocence; a tragic fresco of the fall of Hellenism in Asia Minor; a stinging indictment of Great Power politics, oil-lust and corruption.

Dido Soteriou’s novel – a perennial best-seller in Greece since it first appeared in 1962 – tells the story of Manolis Axiotis, a poor but resourceful villager born near the ancient ruins of Ephesus. Axiotis is a fictional protagonist and eyewitness to an authentic Greece’s “Asia Minor Catastrophe,” the death or expulsion of two million Greeks from Turkey by Kemal Attaturk’s revolutionary forces in the late summer of 1922.

Manolis Axiotis’ chronicle of personal fortitude, betrayed hope, and defeat resonates with the greater tragedy of two Greece, vanquished and humiliated; Turkey, bloodily victorious. Two neighbours linked by bonds of culture and history yet diminished by mutual greed, cruelty and bloodshed.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday everyone! The heat here in the Philippines has been very oppressive of late. The heat has been very unbearable. Nevertheless, I hope the weather is fine wherever you are in the world. Anyway, I hope everyone had a great start to the work week. There is certainly nothing to be fond of about Mondays. Nevertheless, I hope that everyone has started the first day of the work week – unless you are in the Middle East – on a high note. I hope you were able to recoup your lost energy (or motivation) during the weekend. I hope that the rest of the week will go well for everyone. Thankfully, the next two days are holidays here in the Philippines so we get to have an extended weekend. For those who have to work, I hope that the rest of the work week will go as planned and that nothing untoward will happen.

Reading-wise, I have decided to extend my foray into women’s fiction this April. Toward the end of March, I realized that I have quite a lot of books written by women that I have yet to read. This journey took me to different parts of the world and my current read, Carmen Martín Gaite’s Variable Cloud took me to Europe for the first time during this stretch of women’s fiction. I hope that this literary journey will still be as memorable and exciting as the one I had in March. I also hope that, with one quarter down this year, the rest of the year will be kind to everyone. I hope that this year will brim with happiness and prosperity. More importantly, I hope everyone is doing well, in body, mind, and spirit.

Kicking off another blogging week is a fresh Goodreads Monday update. No blogging week commences without this weekly update. While I am still reading works of women writers, I have opted to shake things up by featuring random books, i.e., there will be no theme, for my Goodreads Monday updates this month. With this, I am featuring Dido Sotiriou’s Farewell Anatolia. Before this year, I have never heard of the Greek writer nor have I encountered any of his works. Like last week’s update, it was through a 5 on my TBR prompt that I first came across Sotiriou; actually, the prompt was a freebie so I decided to share works of Greek literature I wanted to read because that day was the Greek Independence Day.

Before starting a career as a writer, Sotiriou worked as a journalist and was a vocal activist. Despite being born into an affluent family, her leftist activism made her shirk her privileges to be able to live a life untethered to anyone else. She fought against the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas. During the Axis occupation, she joined the Communist Party of Greece and worked for an underground anti-fascist newspaper. Sotiriou was vocal about her political ideologies. At the age of fifty, she published her first novel, Οι νεκροί περιμένουν (The Dead Await); she was inspired by the idea of telling the truth. She started to develop this idea after meeting writers during one of her travels to Paris. However, her most renowned work was Ματωμένα Χώματα (Farewell Anatolia). In reading the book, I hope to gain more insights into the history of the region. To be honest, Greek literature is a part of the literary world that I have to explore more.

I just hope I get to obtain a copy of the book considering how long ago it was first published, 1962 to be exact. I sure hope there are still English copies available out there. How about you fellow reader? How was your Monday? What books have you added to your reading list? Do drop it in the comment box. For now, happy Monday and, as always, happy reading!