#and i understand that their insufferability is part of the loosely-defined point but thats not made well enough to justify all this | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

beneaththegildedmoon · 3 months

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Look, maybe if I had read it by itself and not interleaved with the other books im reading atm it would have fared better, but y'all had me convinced The Secret History was some modern classic and I will not forgive you for it

#i know babel was published long afterwards but i just keep reading sections and thinking “Babel did this so much better”#its giving Catcher in the Rye if the pov character was even more insufferable #its giving the Steven Moffat school of writing intelligent characters #and honestly worse than the piss-poor attempt at some kind of commentary is that its so fucking BORING #a solid 70% of the book is just richard & the gang talking inanely about classics with the air of people who have literally never read them #and the other 30% is stilted dialogue about how woefully difficult it is to cover up the murders they did #and i understand that their insufferability is part of the loosely-defined point but thats not made well enough to justify all this #your characters can be boring assholes or your plot can move at a snail's pace but for the love of all the gods dont do both #the only thing running through my head the whole time is how little investment i have in anything thats happening in this stupid book #how did *this* become the inciting incident for the dark academia aesthetic/subculture??#how did this jumble of meandering run-on sentences masquerading as a novel become such a Tumblr darling that dozens of you recommended it??#i feel cheated tbh #cant believe i wasted so much time on this but i genuinely believed it must get good at some point

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