Bookish Thoughts

 There's something freeing about starting out the year with a complete and abject failure. Nowhere to go from here but up. Hopefully. Last year I read every book my book club picked. This was actually the first year I accomplished this feat, despite being the founder and default leader of the book club. But for one reason or another (new babies, my husband's death) I always ended up missing a few meetings. I even missed one meeting in 2021, because my family was under a covid quarantine. But I read every book! It was actually fairly easy. For our first book of 2022, we picked The Goldfinch. It's massive, a real door stopper of a book. But the length didn't frighten me. I routinely read big books (500+ pages) and usually get in at least one 1000+ page book a year. So I dove in with excellent intentions. And then I had a completely novel experience. Any time I was actively reading The Goldfinch I enjoyed it. It was entertaining, if a bit overly descriptive. But then I...

I love these stories about insular groups of young adults that lead to murder. It makes me grateful that my own time in an insular, dysfunctional group didn't result in anyone's death. The Secret History  follows a group of six college students, studying Greek and the classics at a small Vermont college. At the very beginning, the narrator, Richard, reveals that five of them murdered the sixth. Then the story backs up a few months to tell the story of how this murder came about, and what happened afterwards. In a lot of ways, this felt like a book I might read for school. Not that I didn't like it. But it's rich and dense, and I almost feel like I'm supposed to be writing an essay about the imagery or the use of Greek or something. It's reminiscent of a lot of books I did read for school. Like A Separate Peace , we have a group of rich kids at an elite school who seem to be making all their own problems. Plus an undercurrent of repressed homosexuality. And lik...