Oh I wish I had discovered you all earlier. This is the first website where I've felt confident enough to comment and interact with other users, you've all been so welcoming and kind. Thank you for everything.
That was the best thing to read. I love when people get really overinvested and instead of turning into the tinhats who believe costars are sleeping with each other, they create beautiful things like this.
A large part of me is tempted to write a pseudoacademic paper on how Chuck Tingle has become the literary voice for the 21st century, with his love of inherent absurdism, skewering of today's ideas of the proper ideas of sexual love and fulfillment, and of course political topics. (Also as an excuse to bash Jonathan Franzen, because why not?)
In my senior year of college I compromised and took Latin, which I genuinely enjoyed, but the entire time I had a weird, vaguely Henry-lite voice in my head hissing "THIS ISN'T HOMER HOW DARE YOU BETRAY THE AESTHETIC"
Hm. It's definitely a book that deconstructs both Richard's pretension as bullshit and how he holds up Camilla, the one female character, to this pedestal that she really doesn't deserve or want. But the fact remains that it starts off with that structure in place, so it's entirely up to you and your personal tastes as to how much you can stomach it.
Right? Every so often I have stop and be like "Guys, all you do is lay around, translate, and drink a lot how do you move so quickly? What is your workout secret? I do less of all those things and I am not as fleet of foot as you."
I had not read that article until now and I love every word of it. "Forbidden, nerdy bitch goddess" is the best way to describe that book.
Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis. I love the style and it's a great example of an unreliable narrator and the dangers of romantic jealousy. Plus, it's a beautiful work by a Latin American author who isn't Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I love the guy, but a lot of times he's held up as the only Latin American author in US schools when that is in fact not the case.
I deeply deeply love The Secret History. I read it for the first time in the fall of my sophomore year of college and it made me desperately want to be a Classics major, even though that is the opposite message one should take away from that book. It's just so well written! No one is a good person! They're all vaguely ridiculous in the way that rich college students who don't understand consequences are ridiculous! That book makes me feel like I'm vaguely drunk and it's raining outside, and everything is slow and a little lonely. It's one of my favorite book-engendered atmospheres.
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Brainchild