Yeah. That’s the high we’ve all been chasing since The Secret History came out. Every publication season, there’s some new book that the publisher and reviewers insist is just like The Secret History, and if you’re like me, you fall for it every time. You just want that feeling back. You need it. You need it.

At the end of one (1) decade of chasing that The Secret History high, I need to report that it is not replicable. No book, except for one, will ever be The Secret History. It’s not even that no book will ever be that good, because The Secret History isn’t even my favorite book.¹ It’s just that no book will ever be that exact combination of rarefied college Latin nonsense and suspense powerful enough to prize apart my ribs. No campus novel will ever be such a successful iteration of Macbeth. No Macbeth will ever be a campus novel. The Secret History is the perfect marriage of forms. I have to stop wishing that it could be recreated, and instead live satisfied with the knowledge that one such book exists.

“What you’re saying is you finished The Truants?”

UGH YES I FINISHED The Truants. It was no The Secret History, because — as I have proved to myself one million goddamn times now — no other book is ever going to be The Secret History. But here are some of the books that I wished and hoped would be.

(Note: As a marketing strategy, it’s quite solid to compare a book to The Secret History. Evidence: I always want to believe it, and I always read the book. But it’s no mindset to bring to the reading of a book you hope to enjoy. Like, it seems perfectly possible that I might have read and enjoyed any of these books, had I not gone into them wishing they were an exact recreation of one of my all-time faves. That sort of expectation does not a generous reader make.)

The Truants, by Kate Weinberg

I actually enjoyed this one! I think. Somewhat. It’s hard to know, because so much of my mind was taken up with the thought “this is not enough like The Secret History.”

The Truants is set in Norwich, an English town of which I am fond, and it features a charismatic, unreliable South African journalist called Alec, a friendly beautiful delight called Georgie, and an Agatha Christie expert called Lorna. The narrator is equally obsessed with all of them, and I think Weinberg does quite a good job of making the reader understand why — in that way where I, the reader, am too old and cynical to be swayed by these people but I totally get why a university student would not be. I moreover found the explanation of the death quite satisfying. I love the sort of story where you think all the mysteries have been revealed, but then there’s one final reveal that gets uncovered undramatically at the end.

Why it’s not enough like The Secret History: Not enough suspense! Not enough campus! I enjoyed it as a story about friendship and love and sex and death, but I wanted more information about Agatha Christie, and I definitely wanted everyone to feel more guilty and worry more about getting caught. That’s the aspect that absolutely kills me about The Secret History: how the reader is seduced into rooting for them to kill Bunny, and seduced into rooting for them not to get caught. It’s so insidious! It’s so good! It truly makes you confront the narrative weight that goes along with making someone a protagonist.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman

The Secret History meets the Chronicles of Narnia, said a bunch of lying liars, when this book came out. (They also said it was grown-up Harry Potter, which was a further piece of false advertising.) The Magicians has many good things about it and many bad things about it, but while it has many points in common with the Chronicles of Narnia and has clearly been heavily inspired by those books, it bears almost no similarity to The Secret History. Like, to the extent that I’m confused that anyone ever told me it was good for fans of The Secret History. I guess they just meant because it was a campus novel? Ish?

I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that in my year of being a finisher (2019), I wished to finish The Magicians but had to stop because I was so mad about a certain event that occurred at the end of season four. Like, seriously. Some shows will do anything to avoid having a canonical queer romance, incl. being really irresponsible in their depiction of mental illness. This is why all shows should just be CW shows. CW shows have gotten gayer and gayer year over year, to their great advantage.

If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio

Things I remember about If We Were Villains, a book I read fewer than five years ago:

• Shakespeare stuff that was like fine I guess but also mainly made me want to reread the parts of Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin where Janet and her friends go see plays at the local theater. I very much enjoyed those parts, not least because they convinced me to read Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, which is a very good play indeed.
• One of the characters was called Wren, and I liked that. My name is Jenny as in Jenny Wren, so yes, I do enjoy a fictional Wren.
• Maybe some sort of very annoying power couple
• Actually had some canon gay characters
• Some sort of a scene at a lake? Something that happens at a lake at night? I don’t remember. There is a lake, I think, in this book.

If my very limited memory of this book serves, this is the one from my list that felt the most like The Secret History, although it was still very much the diet version. If I had enough time to reread this book, I’d honestly just reread The Secret History instead.

Long Black Veil, Jennifer Finney Boylan

This is the only fiction book I’ve read by Jennifer Finney Boylan, an author whose memoirs I truly adore. She’s one of these memoirists with a true knack for marrying jokes to tragedy in a way that plays up the best parts of both. Any day now, I am going to feel strong enough to face her latest book, which is about dogs and will certainly break my heart.

Long Black Veil is probably the book in this list that most suffered by comparison with The Secret History. Not because it’s the least satisfactory, but because that comparison sets up an expectation for what type of book this is, and that expectation isn’t at all in line with the book Boylan actually wrote. It was marketed as a thriller, when in fact it’s a much slower and more thinky book that explores conflict between identity and morality. It’s good, to the best of my memory! Just, like, not at all similar to The Secret History.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl

I’m cheating by including Special Topics in Calamity Physics on this list! I reread it in the years between my first and second reads of The Secret History, which was the era in which I was least high on The Secret History and thus least furious when books failed to live up to it. Moreover, I picked up Special Topics in the bookshop and purchased it because he was on significant sale — not because I had been told that it was similar to The Secret History.

In fact, I might have liked it better on a first read if I had understood that it was similar in spirit to The Secret History. I bought it because I loved the writing (and because, as mentioned, it was on significant sale)! I thought it was going to be a bildungsroman! It is not a bildungsroman! Do not go into it expecting a bildungsroman! It is significantly more bananas than that! The writing is also just truly delightful — funny, referential, self-deprecating — and I loved the bananas twist that gets revealed about two-thirds of the way through the book. So, as a book qua book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is my favorite from this list.

The Bellwether Revivals, Benjamin Wood

I cleverly used the “here are bullet points of what I remember from this book” on When We Were Villains rather than The Bellwether Revivals. This was a great idea because I do not remember enough things about The Bellwether Revivals to fill out a list of bullet points. I believe it is the first book on this list where I specifically thought, “this is going to scratch that The Secret History itch for me.”

Spoilers: It did not scratch that The Secret History itch for me.

Because I am committed to the bit, I reread my review of The Bellwether Revivals. I am sorry to report that after rereading that post, I remember even less about The Bellwether Revivals than I did before reading it. If you’re thinking about reading The Bellwether Revivals, I recommend giving it a miss and instead reading the book I always get it mixed up with, i.e., Kate Racculia’s Bellweather Rhapsody, which is kinda like The Westing Game but for grownups.

So there you have it. I have spent a decade wishing that another book would make me feel the way The Secret History made me feel, to absolutely no avail. It was a futile hope all along. I have taken Christopher Yates’s Black Chalk off my TBR list in recognition of the fact that it’s never going to happen. I must just be content that The Secret History exists. I must not go chasing waterfalls. One waterfall must satiate me.

The post Books I Have Read in a Futile Effort to Chase That Secret History High appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 77

1:26 – What We’re Reading
4:28 – Books of the Sea
25:40 – Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
43:26 – What We’re Reading for Next Time

Books Mentioned (in order of appearance)

Undermajordomo Minor, Patrick deWitt
The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt
The Lives of Christopher Chant, Diana Wynne Jones (here’s the link to March Magics!)
Charmed Life, Diana Wynne Jones
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
THE ODYSSEY, Homer
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis
Captain Blood, Rafael Sabatini
This Is Not My Hat, Jon Klassen
Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, Avi
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Drowned Ammet, Diana Wynne Jones
“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” David Foster Wallace
Barbarian Days, William Finnegan
The Wanderer, Sharon Creech
The Shadow of the Moon, M. M. Kaye

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Agnes and the Hit Man, Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour

The post Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.77: Books of the Sea and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History appeared first on Reading the End.

1. “A Whole New World” – Pick a book that made you see the world differently.

This may not count, because I barely saw the world at all prior to reading these books. However, I’m still choosing the Chronicles of Narnia. My mother read these books to me and my sister starting when I was three, so there’s not much in my life that didn’t get put through the Chronicles of Narnia goggles. I still experience quite the frisson when I see a lamp-post. Esp in the snow.

2. “Cruella De Vil” – Pick your favorite villain.

Gotta be the other mother from Coraline. In case she’s been missing from your nightmares lately, permit me to refresh your memory: SHE HAS BUTTONS FOR EYES.

3. “I Won’t Say I’m in Love – Pick a book you didn’t want to admit you loved.

Honestly, as I get older and older, I am less and less closety about reading non-prestigious things. I’m going to say P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste and its sequels. They are those Edwardian-era adventure novels that are ideologically troubling on, like, a lot of levels? My fave is problematic.

4. “Gaston” – Pick a character that you couldn’t stand.

The thing is that I love Gaston. Instead of picking a character I couldn’t stand, I shall pick a character who I would hate in real life, but because they’re fictional, I get a huge kick out of spending time with them. And I choose Henry Winter from The Secret History. That dude is creepy? Yet so plausible that he’s capable of convincing people to commit legit murder.

5. “Part of Your World” – Pick a book set in a universe you wish you could live in.

OBVIOUSLY HARRY POTTER.

6. “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” – Describe what the book of your dreams would be like.

Gosh. What would it be like. It would probably have a boarding school. Maybe there would be a dystopian situation? Like a boarding school in a dystopian universe? Plus with lady characters forming bonds and showing up for each other?

7. “Someday My Prince Will Come” – What book character would you marry if you could.

Sherry from Greensleeves. Greensleeves is an amazing book by Eloise Jarvis McGraw that people do not appreciate enough even though it is now available for purchase through your favorite online retailer. Sherry from Greensleeves is curious about everything, reads constantly, and pays attention to other people. Best.

8. “I See the Light” – Pick a book that changed your life.

Oo tough one! Let’s say, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. They at least changed my reading life. Prior to reading Sandman, I was not a comics gal. If you’re not a comics gal, I do not recommend making Sandman your gateway drug. It has kind of a challenging panel structure. However, if you do make it through ten volumes of Sandman, you will come out the other end a legit comics gal. So it was with me.

9. “When You Wish upon a Star” – Pick a book you wish you could reread for the first time.

Jane Eyre. Of course, Jane Eyre. No, it’s not my favorite book of all time, but it’s not not my favorite book of all time, and reading it for the first time was, and would always be, an incredible experience.

10. “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” – Pick a book with some kind of monarchy in it.

How about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall? I read this last year and was surprised to find that it’s wonderful! Mantel is brilliant at bringing historical figures to life, even ones who are larger than life in the first place like Henry VIII. WHY MUST ANNE BOLEYN DIE IN THE SECOND BOOK WHY OH GOD.

11. “Colors of the Wind” – Pick a book with a beautiful colorful cover.

Maggie Stiefvater’s Blue Lily Lily Blue. All of the books in this series actually! But Blue Lily Lily Blue has to be the most beautifulest one of all!

GLORIOUS. DISNEY SONGS.

The post Disney Song Book Tag appeared first on Reading the End.

Once I got it home, I tried to kid myself that I wasn’t going to read it. I checked out five books from the university library that I’ve been wanting, and I started reading (and enjoying!) one of them. But you know how when you are craving one particular book with all of your being, that book suddenly becomes Plato’s book? And all the other books in the world, which were perfectly reasonable a few days ago, are suddenly just shadow-illusions on the cave walls? That’s what happened to me. After a while I gave in. I’m only human.

When I read this book the first time, on my study abroad year, I was enthralled. I skipped all my Friday classes (and I only had classes on Tuesday and Friday) because I couldn’t bear to stop reading long enough to talk about the symbolist imagination. However, I considered it possible in retrospect that this was a function of my state of mind at the time. I was very depressed (bad meds + far from home + constant massive fights with then-boyfriend), and I felt very, very intense about nearly everything I read. I sobbed over Emily of New Moon and thought about how it was all just a Symbol For My Life. I hated We Have Always Lived in the Castle and sobbed because I had no good books to read and that was just a Symbol For My Life. So as you can imagine, I have been doubting the remembered intensity of my The Secret History reading experience. I suspected it would all be much more chill this time around.

NOPE.

The Secret History is about a boy called Richard who goes to a small liberal-arts college in Vermont, joins a strange, exclusive Classics program, and makes friends with the strange, exclusive Classics students, of which there are five apart from him: patrician orphaned twins Charles and Camilla; louche, studious Henry; wealthy Francis with a house in the country; and the bigoted joker Bunny. Richard, who comes from a poorish California family, has made up a complicated mess of lies about his background and is anxious to be friends with all of these people. They become friends, and one thing leads to another, and they end up killing Bunny.

To me, there are few things more suspenseful than stories about people who have committed crimes and might get found out. The Scottish play has me practically screaming with tension every time I read it, and The Secret History is just the same. I was deeply resentful of every life intrusion (work, meals, sleep) that kept me from carrying on reading it straight through. I was even forced to the expedient of reading it while walking to and from work, an activity at which I am very skilled but in which I prefer not to engage, as it reminds me embarrassingly that Past Jenny (in her tween years) felt that reading while walking proved to everyone else that she was above the things of this world. Oh, Past Jenny.

The adjective I would use for this book, and please appreciate that this is a high compliment from me, is elegant. Tartt has a trick of having her characters reveal things casually that shock the narrator and the reader, and at the same time seem perfectly plausible, indeed inevitable. Her characterization is sharp and yet ambiguous enough that you are not sure, when the book ends, who has done what and for what reasons. As Richard wonders about the behavior of each of his friends, you wonder too; you flip back and reread certain passages, trying to tease out the motives of each of the characters in light of what you now know. It’s not showy, the way she does it. It’s elegant.

Plus, you know, as a classics geek, I love it that this book makes Latin students seem super dangerous and dark and edgy. This is not necessarily the typical portrayal of Latin students, but it appeals to me: Watch out for us classics people. We are loose cannons and might push you off a cliff if you cross us. Or we might not. YOU JUST DO NOT KNOW.

In sum, this book is just as gripping as I remembered, and I also think it is an incredibly good book, what with all the writing and the characterization and the making you sympathize with murderers and the LATIN STUDENTS CAN KILL YOU. Read it, please, if you haven’t already. I feel like I have been going around saying lukewarm things about it since reading it a few years ago, when really it deserved raves. If I said something lukewarm to you about this book, disregard it! Listen to me now when I say it is superb and you must read it tomorrow. I would like to turn around and read it all over again, except that would be pushing things a little far, when I have these Dodie Smith memoirs and these amusing Lissa Evans books and Juliet Gardiner’s The Thirties sitting on my couch.

When I lent this book to my sister, she said it was basically Special Topics in Calamity Physics with older, less sympathetic characters. This isn’t altogether fair, but there is a certain family resemblance. The Secret History is more tense, and more polished, and I tend to feel that the group of students is better characterized in it than in Special Topics. Special Topics has that raw, intriguing style of writing, and a more twisty and complex plot. I think if you enjoyed one, you’d be fairly likely to enjoy the other; but if you disliked one, it’s still perfectly plausible that you’d like the other.

What other people thought:

things mean a lot
the stacks my destination
Book Snob
reading is my superpower
Stella Matutina
Flight into Fantasy
Stephanie’s Confessions of a Book-A-Holic
Six Lit[erate] Chicks
The parenthesis and the footnote
Seriously Reading

Let me know if I missed yours!

The post The Secret History, Donna Tartt appeared first on Reading the End.