magical dark academia horror about scary girls...it felt fated that i would like this book.
and i did. for a while.
in fact, i LOVED!!!! the first pagesmagical dark academia horror about scary girls...it felt fated that i would like this book.
and i did. for a while.
in fact, i LOVED!!!! the first pages of this — so atmospheric and intriguing, and unlike anything i'd read since ninth house, a book high i've been chasing for years.
unfortunately i do believe that 3 characters is too many to follow this closely and with unique points of view, that we embarked on our plot too quickly, and that there was so much gore and grossness and vomit as to reduce the impact of the ultimate climax.
similarly the ending was sweet, but these characters leaned too heavy into their stereotypes to be really memorable. that's what happens when we have too many to follow: we end up with The Rebel, The Witch, and The Nerd.
but contrary to all the complaining i just did...i'm going to follow this author.
bottom line: a lot of good! not enough. but a lot.
I never feel more Me than when I have an unpopular opinion on a beloved bestseller.
It's how I made my millions in the first place - and by millions, II never feel more Me than when I have an unpopular opinion on a beloved bestseller.
It's how I made my millions in the first place - and by millions, I mean "tricked people into paying attention to me, only to trap them in a vicious content-creation cycle of semi-funny reviews and a lot more lit fic about annoying women than originally planned."
So sometimes, I like to return to my roots, and pick up whatever young adult fantasy behemoth starring a green-eyed and/or British and/or misunderstood assholey teen boy is stealing the hearts of the public.
I didn't intend to dislike this one, though. I promise. First of all, it's not even YA, and secondly, it's DARK ACADEMIA. I pray at the altar of Donna Tartt. I gamely agreed to pretend its annoying copycat little sibling was in the same hemisphere. I have a countdown to the Ninth House sequel tattooed on my lower back.
And yes, as it turns out, tattoos are not a good countdown strategy. You live and learn.
But this...
Guys, this wasn't good.
And I waited for the alleged "good version." I wanted to read this back when the self-pub original was the only one available, and yet I took the time to allow Tor to edit the ever-living bejesus out of it.
But here we are even still.
As this progressed I could not believe how much of it was conversations between a different duo. Just this guy and this guy. This girl and this guy (who are sleeping together). This girl and this guy (who might want to sleep together? And did once I think?) This guy and this guy (who have kind of a sexual tension as well). This girl and this guy (who are constantly "engaging in enemies to lovers banter," except the banter in question is two annoying high-school-theater-kid brats shrieking I HATE YOU at each other and if I am not even rewarded with an enemies to lovers arc, I am DNFing this series with so much personal anguish it will cause a ripple effect in global politics).
In other words, I kept waiting for the plot to happen, and yet as I noted down at increasing intervals - 28%, 42%, 54%, 66% - IT NEVER ARRIVED.
On top of that, I hated the writing so much it ruined my other current reads (of which there were approximately 11 - I was in one of those I'M GOING TO LIVE FOREVER anti-slumps wherein all you can do is read). It's the kind of goofy faux-intellectual pretentious drivel - to speak honestly, and don't yell at me for simply stating my truth like the non-sinner I am - that makes me lose my mind.
For some reason I feel like I'll end up reading the sequel. But that's probably the past version of me who made her name in unpopular opinions talking.
Bottom line: What were you guys even talking about!
------------ currently-reading updates
need dark academia injected into my veins rn
------------ tbr review
i can't stop thinking about this book and i haven't even read it yet...more
I assume that everyone wants to read a book that is like the young adult book equivalent of Get Out meets Gossip Girl, wiThis review is for: everyone.
I assume that everyone wants to read a book that is like the young adult book equivalent of Get Out meets Gossip Girl, with unlikely friendship and TWO gay relationships and mystery and solving and a tiny hint of dark academia.
So this is to tell everyone that you're right. This is good, and you do want to read it.
Enough said.
Bottom line: Things may not be as they seem IN this book, but they are as they seem about them!
------------- pre-review
sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh.
review to come / 4 stars
------------- currently-reading updates
my hold on this book came in and i started reading immediately....more
They should also say that when you love a trope, you force yourself to read everything that anyone has eThey say when you love something, set it free.
They should also say that when you love a trope, you force yourself to read everything that anyone has ever mentioned in the same sentence as that thing that you love, bringing suffering and disappointment but also just enough joy to keep you going in a toxic cycle, à la when I love a sweet so much that I eat it for every meal and snack until I hate it and then I remember it a year later and it starts again.
Initial reviews say this expression is "way too long" and "very specific" and "also dumb and who cares," but I believe in myself.
And also I believe that my ongoing need to read everything anyone calls "dark academia," even as this results in pain and disappointment-spiked illness on my end, is the right thing.
Because, again, I believe in myself.
This is a book that many people describe as many things. People call it fantasy, even though it doesn't really have any magic in it. People call it YA, even though there's mature content in it. People call it not YA, even though the characters are aggressively teenage and the whole thing has that adolescent je ne sais quoi. People call it a mystery, or a thriller, even though none of the mysteries are solved and no plot event contains even a modicum of the excitement that the word thriller should imply.
And people call it dark academia, when it is actually just unpleasant.
This book is no fun whatsoever.
Why, I imagine - nay, HOPE - you are asking.
I hated this book so much that I took notes while I was reading it. This is roughly on par with me declaring war on someone, or stepping on the back of their shoe so they have to awkwardly hop on one foot to fix it, or offering them a pack of fruit snacks when I have already eaten all of the blues and reds.
In other words, a rare and irrevocable act of permanent disgust.
Let's get into it. (I love to say let's get into it 18 paragraphs into a rant review. Feels like the good ol' days.)
A Lesson in Vengeance follows our protagonist Felicity, a girl who is very rich and very pretty but both of those things are like, so beside the point. Yes, she has about every kind of privilege you can imagine, but she's like, tortured, okay? And like, an intellectual?
She is returning to the world pretentiousness capital of the world, her former boarding school in New England, which is for all intents and purposes interchangeable with any other except for the fact that it was founded to be a school for witches and a group of friends in the old-time-y nineteenth century was inexplicably murdered one by one in a series of impossible crimes.
Pretty major caveat, no?
She had to leave said boarding school previously due to the fact that her best friend / clandestine lover died in front of her in a fairly gruesome way. Although the act itself would be gruesome regardless, really. Anyway, she's back and better than ever, by which I mean hallucinating, believing in ghosts, and generally being a rainy day on the parade that is being wealthy in the autumn at school.
I'm just saying - if there's a spot up for grabs in the Emily Dickinson building of an elite boarding school, I'm putting my name on the list.
Then Ellis arrives. Ellis is the seventeen year old winner of the Pulitzer Prize, who also somehow is a method writer and goes on grand adventures and gets grants and acclaim for what sounds like some YA genre fiction.
Only in young adult novels can this situation unfold, and we are all expected to be like, "ah yes, the Pulitzer is often awarded to debuts coming out of teenagers who write like John Green."
But whatever.
From like day 1 of meeting Ellis our protagonist develops a crush so huge and defining that she starts describing things as "very Ellis" and "incontrovertibly Ellis" and "so wonderfully characteristically romantically classic for this person we just met" and for a character neither of us (Felicity and the reader) know, it sucks bad.
Sucks extra, I should say.
It's hard to say what the plot of this is, because nothing that anyone does makes sense. This becomes a problem because eventually you are supposed to think some things are confusing, but everything already is.
Essentially, Felicity and Ellis team up (and hook up) to discover the truth behind the old-timey murders that I mentioned above. PLEASE do not make my mistake and get excited about this. You get approximately 10% of the information you want, which is just enough to make you think that that sounds like a better idea for a book.
But I can't stress enough that there is no real build or climax here, so I'm not sure what we're doing.
Sometimes the ending of a book can be a little clue of what was supposed to matter, because you get a Big Reveal, but while we do get a very silly Dramatic Twist, it manages to be irrelevant to every single potential story.
It has nothing to do with the historical mystery. It has nothing to do with the fact that Felicity thinks she's being haunted. It has nothing to do with the presence OR the lack of magic, so we spend this whole so-called fantasy kind of unsure if magic is real in it.
WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING HERE.
On top of that, characters appear and disappear for no reason except diversity, like Ellis' nonbinary sibling and the two POC roommates who serve as the sole source of nonwhiteness and all of the representation minus Ellis' and Felicity's horrible tangled yucky romance, if you can call it that.
Finally, this is an annoying book with annoying characters.
I will not be speaking further on that claim.
Bottom line: I am going to call my experience with this book Suffering For Character Development and move on.
But not because there is character development in this book. There is not.
------------------- pre-review
this is a bunch of weird creepy nonsense.
and not in a fun way.
review to come / 1.5 stars
------------------- currently-reading updates
when i'm anticipating a book before it even comes out and then i wait 5 months before reading it, that's actually a compliment.
------------------- tbr review
(chanting) sapphic dark academia. sapphic dark academia. sapphic dark academia. sapphic dark academia...more
Just got word - there's a new set of the coolest possible things you can be. 1) very into Shakespeare (can quote at length in casual conversation) 2) unJust got word - there's a new set of the coolest possible things you can be. 1) very into Shakespeare (can quote at length in casual conversation) 2) unbearably pretentious 3) complicit in a murder with your group of friends
You might think that the coolest things you can be might include traditional things, like "in possession of a motorcycle" or "a New York-based artist with family money" or "on some sort of high school athletic team / squad designated to cheer on said team."
But you'd be wrong.
Dark academia knocks all of those things out of the water.
I loved this book very much, as I love anything that even slightly reminds me of The Secret History, and anything that invests me insanely in a set of annoying (at best) or criminal (at worst) characters, and anything with a plot so twisty and intense that it makes my heart beat faster, and anything whose ending I dread (even as I found the book less and less interesting as it went on).
This is not a perfect book, but books with all of those traits are in short supply. And far be it from me to turn away any dark academia options.
Beggars can't be choosers.
Bottom line: Tell me any book that can help me relive the high of this one for even a second.
--------------- pre-review
my heartbeat has been elevated for like...3 straight hours.
and that is very unusual because i do not work out.
review to come / 4.5 stars
--------------- tbr review
WAY behind on my dark academia quotas. i'm going to lose my Allowed To Be Pretentious And Everyone Finds It Charming badge...more
I have to do the most dreaded thing I ever do...figure out how I "feel" about something.
EvenAll right. I've procrastinated all I can.
The time is come.
I have to do the most dreaded thing I ever do...figure out how I "feel" about something.
Even though I am someone who reviews every book she reads, and even though I read hundreds of books a year, I try to think about feelings as infrequently as possible. I go with a gut rating, I often change it when I actually write the review, and that's it.
But then...once in a while...Nightmare. Chaos. Destruction. A book like this comes along, with an intense and confusing reading experience, and I am unable to rate it.
And then I wait days and weeks and a month if I can swing it so I do not have to do any sort of emotional reflection of any kind. But I've put this off all I can.
This book is weird.
It has some of the dark-academia vibes of books I love, but way more violent and twisty and confusing. The writing is pretty, if sometimes a bit purple for my taste (okay fine you got me I just like using the word "purple" to describe prose too much).
I just kind of like...don't know how I feel about it? But it's a vaguely positive kind of not knowing. So I think...3.5.
The rating of indecisive nice people everywhere. (I'm rebranding to nice.)
These characters are unlikable, but that's the point. The plot, if it exists, winds in fits and starts, but that's the point. It kind of walks the line between literary fiction and thriller, but that's the point. Everything that could take away from it feels intentional, which makes deducting anything seem willfully basic.
What else to say? I'll add this: When I'm reading physical books, I never eat, because I only have two hands and I don't understand the energy distribution that would take. Am I turning pages with one hand and holding my ice cream sandwich in the other? Am I taking bites of salad without turning my eyes to it for optimal forkfuls? How does this work? But on the other hand (buh dum ch), all I do while eating (because I can't be alone with my thoughts) is read on my laptop. And I had a library ebook copy of this book, so boom. Laptop.
But it's such an oddly consuming story, such a disruptively disturbing and gripping and occasionally shockingly violent narrative, that I was often unable to eat. And I lost my appetite if I tried.
Do with that what you will.
Bottom line: Weird! But good? But mostly weird.
---------------- pre-review
what the hell?
review and rating to come
---------------- tbr review
put the word "dark" next to the word "academia" and i am IN...more
I can't even pretend that I'm better than that, or smarter than that, or capable-er of reading red flags tI would join a cult with no questions asked.
I can't even pretend that I'm better than that, or smarter than that, or capable-er of reading red flags than that. The fact of the matter is that not only do I hate making decisions (and therefore find the idea of someone making all of mine for me very compelling), I also (due to years of being a teacher's pet nerd) am desperate to be cool.
Make that cult led by a bunch of hot girls in cute dresses and I am done for.
This is a very cool, very...funny in the way of Satire, very creepyspooky book that I enjoyed quite a bit. I picked it up as part of my need to read every work of literary fiction with a low average rating and a female protagonist who is hard to like, so I didn't really expect to appreciate the reading experience. But I did.
This book is also fairly big on BookTok, and while most of my TikTok feed is made up of the most unhinged and inexplicable videos to exist in the universe since the end of Vine, I occasionally brush with literature (presumably due to my username being "emmareadstoomuch"). People on BookTok like to say very dumb things about this book, like "i liked most of it but it rlly lost its way at the end :/" and "bunny was like good but also it totally stopped making sense" as if endings are something authors just make up at the last minute and they have nothing to do with anything.
That is so stupid it triggers my fight or flight, and the ending of this is good.
The end.
Bottom line: Books like this forever!!!
------------- pre-review
i don't know what it says about me that after reading this book, i just really want to be a blonde rich demon girl in a pastel dress eating mini foods...
okay, i do know. it's that i'm psychologically unwell.
review to come / 3.5ish
------------- currently-reading updates
it's giving a secret history
(this is an observation i made based on title alone, only to discover that the woman who wrote cat person made the same one presumably after reading the whole book)
------------- tbr review
had to add this to my tbr, as a big fan of borderline unpleasant literary fiction about unlikable women...more
I love dark academia more than most things in this life.
This is not a very high bar, but still.
I even love dark academia enough that I am willing to fI love dark academia more than most things in this life.
This is not a very high bar, but still.
I even love dark academia enough that I am willing to forgive it many flaws, which, if you look at my average rating / unpopular opinion shelf / rant reviews, it is clear I am not often down to do.
In recent years, I've had a harder time getting into young adult fantasy. So while a dark academia / YA fantasy combo isn't my IDEAL book, it does have dark academia involved, which is enough for me to get extremely excited.
But alas, to make an accidental reference to a pivotal work by Chinua Achebe...things fall apart.
If you are nostalgic for the bygone days of young adult paranormal romance, I would recommend you this book. There's an unnecessarily British boy for our protagonist to fall in love with, with floppy hair and prep-school good looks. There's the rather, well, not like other girls protagonist in question, who is constantly sustaining injuries and never sleeping but just...going on anyway. There is a school setting with precisely 0 oversight or consequences.
This isn't to say that this book is anywhere near as unpublishable as its early 2010s ancestors. But there's too much overlap for me to have a good time.
Basically, where I wanted dark academia vibes, I got paranormal romance vibes. While much of this takes place in a library, it's over summer break, and the characters' activities are definitively nonacademic in nature.
I think so much of dark academia is...vibe. Spooky, scholarly. And this book was entirely vibeless for me.
Much like, well...a certain young adult subgenre of yore.
Bottom line: Not bad! Just so not what I wanted that it's almost enough to make me rant against my will.
--------------- pre-review
this felt like...a really good second draft.
is that mean? follow up question: does that make sense?
review to come / 2 stars
--------------- tbr review
the words dark academia have an impact on me that nothing else does
clear ur shit prompt 9: a spooky book follow my progress here
Can you believe that of all the eras we could have been born in, we are all blessed to live in the one in which TOTO, WE’RE NOT IN YA FANTASY ANYMORE.
Can you believe that of all the eras we could have been born in, we are all blessed to live in the one in which Leigh Bardugo is publishing books?!
I have often felt like Leigh is able to sneak into my brain and write exactly what I need. (I am calling her by her first name because if she is, in fact, a presence inside my mind then it’s a given that we’d be on that level of familiarity.)
For example: I love heists and ragtag groups of friends and slow burn romance and did I mention I love heists.
And I love fantasy stories and darkness and twists and magic and New England, but I’ve been feeling dismal about young adult books lately, like maybe I’ve grown out of them.
Boom. This book.
I am one happy camper.
This took me a whileeee to get into. I’m talking 100 to 200 pages, even. But once I was in, I WAS IN. I could not put it down and also I wanted to climb inside the pages and live there and give Alex a kiss on the face and also do her homework for her because oh my god she was not doing it and it stressed me out.
This rivals the later Harry Potter books for repeated mentions of homework that the main characters simply are not doing.
I love Alex and her thorniness and her fierceness. I love Dawes and her loyalty and her secret goofiness and her sweaters. I love Yale and its secrets and its grounds and its impenetrability.
I love Darlington because obviously.
(view spoiler)[I had a feeling Bardugo didn’t REALLY kill Darlington...he’s just too good of a character. I knew she would’ve had an affection for him. I guess you don’t kill your darling(ton)s after all…and yes, it’s official, I am the funniest person alive. (hide spoiler)]
I even love teeny-tiny characters who shouldn’t have enough characterization but in fact do and are fantastic (Lauren, Mercy, even Tripp and Hellie and people with like single lines of dialogue).
God damn it I need the next book NOW. Leigh, if I didn’t have all the respect in the world for you, I would scream because you are writing 82 books and 300 TV and film adaptations and I just want you to let me back into this world right now, please and thank you.
Honestly...I am profoundly impressed by the fact that this book felt N O T H I N G like anything else I’ve read by Leigh Bardugo. She is just such a good writer.
Also, speaking of the fact that this is very un-Bardugo.
This IS NOT a young adult book. In young adult books, things can be relatively happy-happy-joy-joy. General fiction has no such obligation.
There is a lot of violence and gore and intense imagery in this story. It is not a comfy read. You can say that this is not your cup of tea for those reasons, and you are well within your rights to say so.
But it’s not fair to say this is a *bad book* because it has those things.
There is not a cap on the upsetting content that a story can contain before it’s gone overboard. A book is not bad because it dares to address multiple difficult topics.
This is a book where awful and disturbing things happen, yes, but it isn’t a book where awful and disturbing things happen for no reason. They don’t happen in a vacuum without cause or results. The characters are affected by them.
It handles multiple tough topics with care and with sensitivity. It is a well written and well handled book. Trying to “cancel” it because it does so is equivalent to banning books.
Anyway. Censorship rant over.
Back to the important stuff.
GIVE ME THE SEQUEL.
I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO INVESTED IN THE PLOTLINE OF A BOOK THAT HASN’T COME OUT YET.
I, too, have a cemetery of forgotten books. A mental one, if you will.
And I am filing this one under "to forget" straightaway.
This book has been on myI, too, have a cemetery of forgotten books. A mental one, if you will.
And I am filing this one under "to forget" straightaway.
This book has been on my to-read list for what feels like 11 years, but was probably between 2 and 4. It seems like required reading for anyone who a) likes books, b) likes genre-bending blends of literature and fantasy, or c) enjoys fun books but is also pretentious.
I'm all three, so this seemed dreamy.
And then I found a copy of it in a used bookstore and the cat lady cashier recommended it as I was buying it (which is always a good sign), and it seemed dreamiER.
And then I started reading it, and for the first 15% it still seemed dreamy.
And then it took me almost two weeks to finish it because I dreaded even picking it up.
Everything about this fell apart for me. The pacing, the characters, my interest, the treatment and discussion of women, the themes, the setting. I didn't care about anything I was supposed to and sometimes I was even growing AGGRAVATED.
I hate to be aggravated.
I am glad this book is a ~modern classic~ and so many people's all time favorite and blah blah blah but honestly...
I don't even understand how people like this book.
And that almost never happens to me.
Bottom line: Sorry, everyone! Except really I feel like you should apologize to me.
-------------- pre-review
...except this one, for me.
review to come / 2ish stars
-------------- tbr review
books about books are the best kind of books...more
My original review of this wasn't much of anything, because I believed (and still kind of do) that everything worth saying about this book has been saMy original review of this wasn't much of anything, because I believed (and still kind of do) that everything worth saying about this book has been said.
However, there are things that I believe no one should say emerging in real time, and so contributing my likely already-expressed thoughts might counterbalance them, to some degree.
In my first foray at writing about this (which you can still see below), I focused on the immersion of it. I said I "loved" its characters, though of course I meant more that I loved them as figures, considering they are unlikable murderers. I wrote about it vaguely and glowingly, thinking everyone had sort of...gotten the point of the book, already.
But then I read this review in Gawker, so I'm coming back.
The Secret History follows mainly our narrator, Richard, as he looks back on his time in the classics program of a liberal arts college. Richard is unhappy, impressionable, desperate. His values are more ideas than ideals - vague and dim reflections of what love, and beauty, and wisdom, concepts he's never known, might feel or look like, rather than what they are.
He arrives at his preppy and prestigious(ish) New England college to slowly become obsessed and then part of the mysterious and selective classics program, a cultlike group of trust fund babies led by an often-overstepping and charismatic professor.
Coming from a poor and abusive background, where beauty is nowhere to be found, Richard wants nothing more than to immerse and lose himself in this group of wealthy and charming students. He wants to befriend them, to sleep with them, to live with them, to do everything he can to become them.
Including, as they indulge in ever-spiraling hedonism, murder.
And it never works.
When our story ends, our group is decimated, some members dead, some irrevocably changed, all unwilling to return to the story of that fateful year - all except Richard, who is unable to leave it behind.
When I hear this, I don't believe that the point of the story, or what Tartt is trying to tell us, is that a love of beauty is equivalent to an amoral life. I don't think she condemns an appreciation for the aesthetic, or even a classical scholarship.
I don't think you're supposed to like these characters, or even think they're very realistic - they are, after all, portraits in hindsight written by someone in the throes of unrequited obsession.
I don't think you're supposed to relate to them, or to see their story as something that might happen to you if you read too much Greek myth or like pretty things too much.
To quote the article that inspired the fit of rage that has me typing away, I don't think this is "about all the things [its writer] loved," while "miss[ing] the point of them entirely." At the age of seventeen, they continue, they "wanted (I thought) exactly what its youthful characters wanted: a poetic life, a mythic life, a life shot through with meaning. I loved (I thought) exactly what its characters loved: nostalgic emblems of an era imagined as significant."
To that I say: huh?
As I grow older, I care less for lovely or perfect or nice or even good (in the moral definition of the word) characters, and find myself only wanting to read about the unlikable, the complex, the ones who have something to say on what I shouldn't do, rather than teach me about what I should.
It was clear to me that The Secret History is not the latter example, but the former.
Our merry band of classics fetishists may think they are living a life of poetry and meaning, but we, the readers, know they aren't. We know that life's beauty lies not in pleasure without regard for others, in the fulfillment of selfish desires, but in case we get confused, Donna Tartt shows us that a life lived by those guidelines leads to irrevocably damaged relationships, unfading pain, and death.
The Secret History is not a nihilistic book because its characters' behaviors result in no meaning. Quite the opposite - it is a book about what makes life meaningful by showing us what meaning is not.
The Gawker piece quotes a Tartt essay in which she writes, “'Something in the spirit longs for meaning — longs to believe in a world order where nothing is purposeless, where character is more than chemistry, and people are something more than a random chaos of molecules,'” and in this vein concludes, "To take Tartt the essayist seriously is to wager on that meaning. Even if that means leaving Hampden behind."
And I would agree. To find meaning, one must leave Hampden behind - for it was never intended that what happened there should be lived by as example.
(I also think there's something very interesting in the class dynamics here. But I'll save that for the next time I get mad enough to write almost 1,000 words.)
Bottom line: Book so nice I reviewed it twice.
------------ book club update
this is the july pick for the beautiful world book club!! elle and i will be vibing amidst the dark academia and the gluttony and the classics. please join us!!
------------ original review
Here is the problem with reviewing every book I read: Sometimes I throw around terms before I really need them, and then once I read THE book, The Story that requires and deserves that descriptor, I have nothing to give it.
Right now I have this problem. Because I have used the word “immersive” before, and immediately upon my completion of this book it became clear that I should have saved it for right now.
I felt like I lived inside these pages. I felt like I began to think in the beautiful and sharp prose that fills them. I felt like I knew the characters, ate decadent lunches and walked the snowy campus and whispered with them. I felt an aching emptiness, a genuine longing, when I read the final words.
I miss living here.
This was very, very slow - to the point that about halfway through I said (inexplicably, aloud), “I don’t know what they’ll even do for the rest of the book” - and yet I was gripped by it.
It’s genuinely masterful.
I love Richard and I LOVE Camilla and I love Francis and I, fine, okay, at least like Charles and Henry and even Bunny and Julian.
And I miss them all.
This is an incredible work, but maybe the most incredible thing is how the reader is Richard. I, too, miss my bygone days at my prestigious New England college with my whip-smart group of eccentric friends, and, like him, I am too quickly forced to realize the fallacy of such a feeling.
After all, it was all a fiction.
Bottom line: I’m raising this to a five star rating.
------------ pre-review
you'll have to excuse me, i'd love to actually write something here but my brain is broken and i am incapable of thought.
also seems absurd to try to use words when donna tartt took all the good ones.
Someone PLEASE procure me a striking, modern, big-city apartment with lots of windows, where I can hold a glass of expensive wine and gaze unseeing ovSomeone PLEASE procure me a striking, modern, big-city apartment with lots of windows, where I can hold a glass of expensive wine and gaze unseeing over the skyline at night, because apparently I’m going to feel melancholy for the rest of my life over never again being able to read this for the first time and if I’m going to do so I at least want to be glamorous about it.
Or, at the very least, I need to locate the sort of old-fashioned library described in 1920s mystery novels with a bar cart stocked with aged scotch and shelves filled with leather-bound tomes, except their antique spines will be a façade for the kinds of things I actually enjoy reading, rather than being 800 different copies of the Bible or whatever, and I will never drink the scotch because everything about the process of drinking scotch is like the scotch is asking you not to drink it. (Scotch is the poison-dart frog of beverages.)
Basically what I’m saying here is - Ever since I read the last page of this book three months ago, I have felt a small, unrelenting sadness, which I believe will only be solved by one of the following methods: a) I dedicate my life to tracking down a door to the Starless Sea, and either I find one or it turns out the real reward was the friends I made along the way; b) I experience repeated memory loss, allowing myself to read this book over and over again for the first time, re-beginning every time I finish it; or c) I live the rest of my days in homage to this story.
All options will require funds that I will never have (I’m an English major, after all), so please kindly Venmo me at your convenience. Thanks.
This is the most gorgeous ode to stories and literature. It’s a thank-you gift to anyone who has ever been a Reader, with a capital R - not just someone who reads but someone WHO READS, as an identity, as a life-force, as a passion, as the meaning of life.
I dare any true bookworm to read this book with an open heart and a ready mind and not feel grateful that their life overlapped with its publication date.
Erin Morgenstern’s ability to create divine settings you can see and smell and lust after and yearn to experience is unparalleled.
My favorite book ever is, as anyone who has so much as made the online equivalent of eye contact me knows, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I love it with enough passion that everything about it is my favorite of that thing: my favorite characters, my favorite prose, and, naturally, my favorite setting.
Before I read this book, my unrivaled first runner-up was the setting of the Night Circus.
Now, I think both Wonderland and the circus may have been bumped down a slot. Never has a setting known me, seen my soul, like that of the magical underground great world of stories in these pages.
Plus, I didn’t have to slog through a Night Circus-level instalove romance to get there.
This was a perfect book. Mysterious, confusing, strange, magical. Beautifully written and populated with characters you love hard and immediately. I read this so slowly because I SAVORED it. I, a compulsive speed-reader whose simultaneous highest compliment and M.O. is reading a book in a day or so, knew that my finishing this book would be a small heartbreak, and so I tried to postpone it as long as I could.
So instead, I’ll pay the highest compliment to this that any reader can pay to any story -
Bottom line: It was hard to pick up another book after reading this one.
------------- rereading updates
THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!!!
all month long, i'll be rereading this fav as part of my book club with my lovely elle! follow on instagram here or join the discussion here.
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Yes, I teared up upon finishing my reread of this book like a starlet in an old movie. No, I don't want to talk about it. I JUST WANT THIS TO NEVER END.
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