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Final reads of 2024
Jan. 3rd, 2025 06:31 pmThe 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: ( minor spoilers )
Meanwhile, Lesley IS blorbo and I didn't really get any of what I wanted for her: ( a few more spoilers ) 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: ( minor spoilers )
Meanwhile, Lesley IS blorbo and I didn't really get any of what I wanted for her: ( a few more spoilers ) 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.
