#i just want to read the secret history

[parfumgirlgirl3]

The tragedy of going on a beach trip and having forgotten my book.

I did though find so many fucking seashells so not a complete loss.

[myokk]

My writing/reading question of the day:

Do you prefer present tense or past tense? Or something entirely different like future tense? For writing AND reading🫶

The more I write (I wish I realized how fun it was before this year😭😭😭) the more I realize I like to play around with language & tense choice can have such a profound impact on how your writing comes across & even how I feel as I’m writing. With my oneshots I’ve been playing around with only present tense & my main fic is past tense (but present during the flashbacks - idk don’t ask it just felt right😆).

Or does nobody else think about tense and I’m just alone in this😆😆😆 LANGUAGE IS JUST SO COOL !!!!

[betryl]

Along with Camilla's and Bunny's, another pov I would love to see is Charles'. He had such a tragic development throughout the book, but we get to know very little about what he actually went through, and it makes it easy to put all the blame on him – of course, he was an abuser and that doesn't change, but it would still be so interesting to actually get his own opinion, without Henry, Camilla or Francis speaking on his behalf. Not to justify him, but just to see things the way he did and get yet another interpretation of the whole story.

We'd get to know what his and Camilla's relationship was actually like – and it would probably look even worse from his perspective. His encounters with Francis, too. He puts the blame on Charles taking advantage of him, even though they were probably both taking advantage of each other in some ways – but we never got to hear how Charles felt about the situation.

We'd get to see him slowly lose his mind to alcohol, and it would probably be even more subtle than how it felt from Richard's pov, making it even the more chilling. Him getting progressively more depressed, more irritable, more violent (and therefore, I believe, more guilty about his own behavior too), to the point of being basically drunk all the time, and feeling like a totally different person to how he was at the beginning.

And then we'd get to see him get more and more paranoid about Henry. I would have loved to see more of their dynamic, because while I've seen some people reducing it to a love triangle with Camilla (?), it wasn't just that, and Charles had quite a few valid reasons to hate him. Henry pulled Charles into the whole mess basically against his will – he was the only one who, more than once, tried convincing the others the murder was a bad idea, and no one listened to him and listened to Henry instead. He was depressed for Bunny's death. He got coerced by Henry to get involved with the police too, having to bear the weight of everyone possibly ending up in jail if he did something wrong.

He realized that all of this was mostly Henry's fault, but then the situation with Camilla came along, and Charles suddenly understood he had just become the next target Henry might have wanted to get rid of – and he even tried to. He had every right being scared of him, but the others barely even believed him. So the paranoia turned into genuine fear for his life, until he eventually snapped, and we know what happened next.

All of this was hidden behind Richard's pov, which definitely made it difficult to understand his actions or how he was feeling. As much as I don't like him as a person, he really grew on me and genuinely became one of my favorite characters. And seeing it all from his perspective would be terrifying.

[moonys-chocolate28]

henry pookie ily but i CANNOT keep defending ur actions

[super-nova5045]

rip coriolanus snow you would've unfortunately fucking loved henry winter

[macaulaytwins]

Mornings at Hampden College

[springs-hurts]

Lmao I just remembered, just before starting The secret history, I saw a Pinterest post and read that part where (I think it was-) Francis who kissed Richard (was it Charles? Or Francis? Not sure) anyway, I read that part and I mistook him for Henry (FOR SOME FUCKING REASON 😭) and this dumb girl thought Richard and Henry kissed and I waited the whole book to see it😭😭 like that has to be one of THE most embarrassing thing I've ever done.

[lyriclight]

I convinced my crazy lit teacher to read The Secret History. Oh boy .

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

1, 4, 21, 25!

1. How many books did you read this year?

127 (according to StoryGraph), but I'm 70% through The Second Sex and will probably finish a handful more before January.

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

I really loved Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant trilogy and am planning on checking out his other works. I also started reading Naomi Novik and am actively resisting her Napoléonic Wars But With Dragons series (Spinning Silver, her latest release, was really tight, but Uprooted was ... less purposeful? And I don't wanna commit to a ten-book series).

Otherwise, I actually did a lot more branching out to explore authors I've already read books by to confirm if it was a fluke or if I consistently like their work — Colson Whitehead (anything that isn't autobiographical is masterfully written), Donna Tartt (this woman has a chokehold on my SOUL), R.F. Kuang (great ideas though sometimes a bit ambitious for her abilities — but she's growing more powerful). I've read stories from Nghi Vo's Singing Hills series and have enjoyed all of them, but I haven't checked out their other works, so it feels disingenuous to say I love them as an author for now, but I'm certainly open to reading their other works based on this. Oh, and I finally read my first Discworld book, so you could say it's all over for me.

21. Did you participate in or watch any booklr, booktube, or book twitter drama?

lol, not even familiar with those communities.

25. What reading goals do you have for next year?

My book club friends this year had soft, no-pressure goals of 100 books for the year, so I set that as a passive benchmark for myself. I guess ... reduce the number of books in my to-read pile on StoryGraph? I seem to keep adding more every time I read another book. ^^;

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

Getting off my ass and downloading my favorite fics to put on a jump drive I bought with a fuck tonne more storage than the two I already had from when I was in school and, wow, this is actually so much easier than the rest of the stuff I’ve been downloading for various reasons (articles on stuff I want to have around but worry might be impacted by this new presidency). You just pick pdf (or whatever you like) and bam! It’s right there in your downloads ready to be stashed away, no annoying nitpicking where I have to delete stuff I don’t need in the document or huge blank spaces, it’s just ready! Like, listen. I love “print friendly and pdf” Firefox extension, but I always have to end up deleting some stuff that is just taking up space. It does its job! It’s just not going to be neat and tidy when the website doesn’t intend for you to do this. Archive of our own does that whole thing of making a pdf themselves! This is going to go so much faster than the other stuff I’ve been downloading as pdfs

Anyway, I love you as well Smithsonian magazine website for not only being free, but also just having that extension on all your articles! That’s actually how I found it in the first place. Before that I was copy pasting every paragraph into a pages document and it was way more tedious.

[elisedonut]

fuck i'm actually going to end up enjoying Sevpercy huh

maybe in a picky I like them when they are in my head or when I do it kind of way

or in a time travel way because when it comes to Snape I like his teenage self a lot more than his adult self

[he-butch]

anyone read the secret history lately?

[theotherrichardpapen]

Reading List 2023-2024 📚

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The Song or Achilles - Madeline Miller

The Myth of the Wrong Body - Miquel Missé

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Remainder - Tom McCarthy

If We Were Villains - M. L. Rio

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Bones and All - Camille DeAngelis

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche

Diaries - Franz Kafka

Frankenstein - Mary Shelly

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales - H. P. Lovecraft

The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri

1984 - George Orwell

The Iliad and The Odyssey - Homer

Unnatural Causes - Dr Richard Shepherd

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes - Eric LaRocca

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

The Trial of the Templars - Malcolm Barber

Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco

Demian - Hermann Hesse

Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

The Atlas Six - Olivie Blake

Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reids

Ninth House - Leigh Bardugo

Vita Nostra - Maryna & Serhiy Dyachenko

Pageboy: A Memoir - Elliot Page

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodr Dostoevsky

(updated: 03/01/24)

[elytrafemme]

i have at this point talked to at least a few of my college friends about cough syrup, only two of them knowing it by explicit name. and i find it incredibly funny because one of them was an actual committed fan who dropped after the major hiatus, and the other one only read five chapters in before giving up 😭 i have much love for the hiatus survivors because my dear close friends were NOT committing to that shit

[jovalencia]

okay finished cress. crazy ass book I love my friends so much. in order to finish winter by my made up new years deadline I would have to listen to six hours a day every day including new years eve and that's just not gonna work for me. and I want to read fairest and stars above and wires and nerve one and 2 too so I think I'm Really gonna extend my deadline to when classes start back up. and even after then at the beginning of what promises to be the most stressful quarter so far I still have my infinity train rewatch and my secret history reread. and don't ask me why i do this to myself for no reason.

[fr0gg13b413]

weary edges fray, where is this pain from and where will it go to next