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Victorian Psycho

by Virginia Feito

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We Live Here Now

by Sarah Pinborough (Goodreads Author)

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— Aug 28, 2025 09:38PM

Aug 27, 2025 09:01AM

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The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

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read in April 2025

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retal's library said:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

" 8 months later and I’m done
8 months and all I felt was the warmth of this book. I loved every character. Every page of this made me have a new appreciation of life and literature. This is truly something you should read at least once in your life. W 8 months later and I’m done
8 months and all I felt was the warmth of this book. I loved every character. Every page of this made me have a new appreciation of life and literature. This is truly something you should read at least once in your life. Words are failing me right now; but the things that I want to say will never do this justice.

“THE SNOW in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”

“DOES SUCH a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
A moi. L’histoire d’une de mes folies.”

Why not? I was slightly giddy with the force of his personality but the extremism of the offer was appealing as well. His students—if they were any mark of his tutelage—were imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world: they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks—sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferehat. I envied them, and found them attractive; moreover this strange quality, far from being natural, gave every indication of having been intensely cultivated.
Studied or not, I wanted to be like them. It was heady to think that these qualities were acquired ones and that, perhaps, this was the way I might learn them.

“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?” he said, looking round the table. “Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls—which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn’t it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them,”

My favourite scene:
“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.”
“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,” said Bunny

That class was truly fascinating and this scene particularly was ringing in my head while reading the end of the book how the people who most believed in what they said are the ones who did the complete opposite.

I will forever be reading this.
The only books ever written 🙂‍↔️✨ ...more "

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(page 201 of 559)
— Aug 28, 2025 09:39PM

Apr 20, 2025 09:59AM · see review