From the Bookshelf of Nothing But Reading Challenges…

The Secret History

Donna Tartt

Start date: November 1, 2024

Finish date: November 30, 2024

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What Members Thought

Jan 27, 2020 Heather - hturningpages rated it liked it

Shelves: reviewed, i-really-tried-to-like-this

Rating: 3.5/5 types of drugs in Richard's system.

Format: Audiobook.

What it's like: The prose reminded me a lot of The Likeness (which I loved) but with MUCH worse characters. Also, the overall plot and story-telling style are similar to If We Were Villians.

What I loved: I feel really conflicted about this! I loved Tartt's descriptions. She has a lush writing style and an intriguing understanding of the human psyche. I really enjoyed getting lost in that cold winter in Vermont with Richard, feel Rating: 3.5/5 types of drugs in Richard's system.

Format: Audiobook.

What it's like: The prose reminded me a lot of The Likeness (which I loved) but with MUCH worse characters. Also, the overall plot and story-telling style are similar to If We Were Villians.

What I loved: I feel really conflicted about this! I loved Tartt's descriptions. She has a lush writing style and an intriguing understanding of the human psyche. I really enjoyed getting lost in that cold winter in Vermont with Richard, feeling his desperation and pride war over his actions. I enjoyed the unraveling of the mystery, but it felt over too quickly and I was much less interested in the aftermath.

What was meh: The characters. SIGH.
At first they seem mysterious and interesting, but the more you find out about them the more I disliked them. I'm sure that was by design, but at the end of the book I just felt frustrated and lost.
I also had issues with the pacing for most of the 2nd half of the book. Basically, once the mystery elements are solved, I completely lost interest. The further I got into the 2nd half, the more I felt the story loose tension and my dislike for the characters grew until I couldn't really understand or relate to any of them by the end and I was just happy it was over.

Who I'd recommend it to: Fans of mystery, beautiful prose, morally grey characters, and dark academia.

Favorite lines:
I don't know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days, a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything somehow fit together. Some sly and benevolent providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together, my future, my past, the whole of my life and I was going to sit up like a thunderbolt in bed and say, "Oh, oh, oh."

Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling I'd never had. That reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force that we didn't understand toward an end that I did not know.

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things, naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror, are really too terrible to grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns. When the ashes are cold. When the mourners have departed. When one looks around and finds oneself, quite to one's surprise, in an entirely different world.

What are the dead anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star. ...more

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Dec 23, 2015 Joyce rated it liked it

Fascinating, odd, long.

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Feb 26, 2018 Deedee marked it as to-read

Shelves: coming-of-age, d3, contemporary-fiction, boarding-school, books-to-read-snow-is-falling, books-about-books-15-or-more, np-what-weve-read-2021, fiction-friendship, book-club-books, debut-novels-unread

TWINS "And then there were a pair, boy and girl. I saw them together a great deal, and at first I thought they were boyfriend and girlfriend, until one day I saw them up close and realized they had to be siblings. Later I learned they were twins." ...more

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