Final reads of 2024
Jan. 3rd, 2025 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterThe Secret History by Donna Tartt: I was in high school when I first read this book, and my reaction to it as an adult has been very different. It's not that teenage me didn't understand, exactly, so much as that she was too enamoured of the trappings (counterculturally glamorous, slightly-older-than-me people doing dark and forbidden things in a highbrow academic setting) to care about the substance. When you're committed to romanticising self-destruction, there's not much anyone can do - all warnings of the consequences will either become fodder for the fantasy or, as in my case with the ending of this story, be carelessly discarded. Reading the book again just now, the first half was as clear in my memory as if I'd read it only a year ago; the second half was gone almost entirely, save for a vague sense that things weren't going to go well for the main characters and that incest was going to come into it somewhere.
Anyway. Disaffected Californian college student Richard Papen transfers impulsively to a small arts school in Vermont, where he falls in with a clique of deeply pretentious classics students in a tiny department that's run like a cult. Their group bonding takes a sinister, occult-tinged turn that eventually devolves into murder. That's the first half of the book and the part my teen self found irresistible. The second - and ultimately, whatever teen me thought, far darker - half deals with the slow, messy demise first of their friendships and then of their lives as consequences of their crime come home to roost.
The gradual lifting of Richard's idealistic blinkers concerning his classmates is the obvious main theme and a powerful one, but what interested me most was the issue of his own culpability. Richard comes to see himself as having been deceived, which is true; he identifies his own fatal flaw as one of preoccupation with aesthetics ('a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs'), which is also true; but he never really grapples with the utter void of character or conviction that enabled this morbid longing to run away with him unimpeded. Richard never paused to think before involving himself in the murders. The others were doing it, so he did it too - it was pretty much that simple. And it made me think about how few evil masterminds there really have been in the whole history of human wrongdoing, versus how many passive followers who'd have done no such thing on their own but whose complicity has been utterly instrumental. In terms of sheer volume, moral indifference must massively outweigh malice as an ultimate source of evil.
Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch: I did not, as promised in my last post about these books, take any break from the series at all. I tore on through them to the end of Lies Sleeping, which is the seventh book and the big climax of the overall mystery. I enjoyed it all enormously but, as is depressingly often the case for me, the characters I've grown most invested in aren't the ones who look like they're going to have much to do with future installments. By which I mean: the villain has been defeated and I want the villain back, goddamnit. He's not blorbo this time but he's a supremely creepy fucker who majorly scratches my "going off to uni and learning sinister secrets amid the glorious trappings of classical academia" itch (an accidental theme for this post, apparently) and his exploits interested me far more than any of the side plots or good guy characters Aaronovitch has going.
Meanwhile, Lesley IS blorbo and I didn't really get any of what I wanted for her: she didn't stay disfigured, her motives weren't studied in sufficient depth, she didn't get a proper redemption arc. If anyone who's read the books can promise me that any of these things become a factor in wherever the hell the series is going next, then I'll be right back on board, but for the time being I think I'm happy to leave things where they are and let books 1-7 comprise the whole of my personal canon.
Anyway. Disaffected Californian college student Richard Papen transfers impulsively to a small arts school in Vermont, where he falls in with a clique of deeply pretentious classics students in a tiny department that's run like a cult. Their group bonding takes a sinister, occult-tinged turn that eventually devolves into murder. That's the first half of the book and the part my teen self found irresistible. The second - and ultimately, whatever teen me thought, far darker - half deals with the slow, messy demise first of their friendships and then of their lives as consequences of their crime come home to roost.
The gradual lifting of Richard's idealistic blinkers concerning his classmates is the obvious main theme and a powerful one, but what interested me most was the issue of his own culpability. Richard comes to see himself as having been deceived, which is true; he identifies his own fatal flaw as one of preoccupation with aesthetics ('a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs'), which is also true; but he never really grapples with the utter void of character or conviction that enabled this morbid longing to run away with him unimpeded. Richard never paused to think before involving himself in the murders. The others were doing it, so he did it too - it was pretty much that simple. And it made me think about how few evil masterminds there really have been in the whole history of human wrongdoing, versus how many passive followers who'd have done no such thing on their own but whose complicity has been utterly instrumental. In terms of sheer volume, moral indifference must massively outweigh malice as an ultimate source of evil.
Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch: I did not, as promised in my last post about these books, take any break from the series at all. I tore on through them to the end of Lies Sleeping, which is the seventh book and the big climax of the overall mystery. I enjoyed it all enormously but, as is depressingly often the case for me, the characters I've grown most invested in aren't the ones who look like they're going to have much to do with future installments. By which I mean: the villain has been defeated and I want the villain back, goddamnit. He's not blorbo this time but he's a supremely creepy fucker who majorly scratches my "going off to uni and learning sinister secrets amid the glorious trappings of classical academia" itch (an accidental theme for this post, apparently) and his exploits interested me far more than any of the side plots or good guy characters Aaronovitch has going.
Meanwhile, Lesley IS blorbo and I didn't really get any of what I wanted for her: she didn't stay disfigured, her motives weren't studied in sufficient depth, she didn't get a proper redemption arc. If anyone who's read the books can promise me that any of these things become a factor in wherever the hell the series is going next, then I'll be right back on board, but for the time being I think I'm happy to leave things where they are and let books 1-7 comprise the whole of my personal canon.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-03 12:00 pm (UTC)Okay, so I did look for Rivers of London based on your recommendation, and my library has the series, but not all of them, and none are in order. It's like 4, 5, 7, 10. Gaah! Weirdly a common problem for library collections. I can ask them to reorder them to complete the series, but who knows how long that will take?
no subject
Date: 2025-01-03 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-03 03:20 pm (UTC)Okay, now I want to read it even more! I can see that happening. Morbid glamour is definitely more fun.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-03 09:59 pm (UTC)I wonder how it is that library collections always seem to end up like that? Another similar thing my local always seems to do is stock a whole popular series in every format imaginable…except for the first book in the series, which they will ONLY have in e-audiobook. It’s happened to me like three times now with three totally unrelated series and I’m always so confused.
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Date: 2025-01-06 03:36 pm (UTC)It's partly because of ordinary wear and tear. Like if people are starting a series, they tend to start at Book 1, so that one wears out the fastest. BUT I have seen so often, that Book 1 will only be available as eAudio. I hate that! But yeah, you can usually request a physical copy to be added to the collection. We try to stay on top of it, but there are so many series, we physically can't track them all.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-06 08:03 pm (UTC)Will have to look into the requests thing. I actually had no idea you could do that! There’s probably a tab on their website somewhere…
no subject
Date: 2025-01-07 12:28 pm (UTC)It's usually on the website. You might need to be logged into your library account to do that, and you might need the ISBN. (It's easy to look up--every Goodreads/Amazon/ThriftBooks type retailer will have it listed somewhere.) Every system's a little different, but they should all have that option somewhere!
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Date: 2025-01-03 03:16 pm (UTC)And, as you say, part of what is haunting about the book is that Richard Papen's fatal flaws are at least in part the flaws of the readers: we also are so enchanted by the aesthetics we don't really mind the death of the Vermont farmer (and his death never haunts anyone; it's Bunny's death, the death of a member of the circle, that matters), we feel the lure of choosing this great friendship over everything else. Which doesn't mean that any particular reader would have made the same choice in Richard's place, but it makes his evil more insidious and understandable than that of a character who is driven by malice.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-03 10:11 pm (UTC)But I think that’s really what you want in any good deconstruction: it has to feel personal. As you say, even if most of us would never go as far as Richard went, I’m sure we’ve all at some point compromised our morals for the sake of belonging. So Richard’s guilt ends up feeling shared, in a way, because it’s not as big a stretch as we’d like to imagine our own way into his shoes.
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Date: 2025-01-04 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-12 09:33 pm (UTC)