OnlineBookClub.org

indepaintence wrote: ↑01 Feb 2019, 14:19 The book that I'm reading right now is amazing and I'm recommending it to everyone. I don't know what kinds of things you do and don't like, but it sounds like you don't either! I would recommend you give The Secret History by Donna Tartt a try.

The story is set in the 1980s or 1990s (it's hard to tell) on a college campus in Vermont, but it feels like it could be the 1940s because of the portrayal of the characters and their interests. The book opens with the narrator contemplating a murder he was involved in, but quickly flips to his youth. The narrative is told from the point of view of Richard Papen, who attends a semi-exclusive college in rural Vermont. He falls in with a mysterious group of students studying ancient texts and Latin, and then things start to get strange as he learns more about the people he's befriended. It's written in a really indulgent and beautiful tone. Though it can be dark, with some scenes inching toward horror, the book doesn't fit any of the stereotypes of that genre. I'll give you an example of one of Tartt's great paragraphs:

"Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty. A group of red-cheeked girls playing soccer, ponytails flying, their shouts and laughter carrying faintly over the velvety, twilit field. Trees creaking with apples, fallen apples red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of them rotting on the ground and the steady thrumming of wasps around them. Commons clock tower: ivied brick, white spire, spellbound in the hazy distance. The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars."

I hope you're able to find some books that you really like! Good luck!