| goodreads | ★★★★

The Secret History by Donna Tartt is not a typical murder mystery novel. Honestly, after reading it, I found it barely seemed to fit the genre at all. You know from the very beginning who will die. The author lays out the whole murder scene in the prologue. So instead of trying to figure out who committed the murder and how, the reader is trying to piece together the why. What was it that drove the killer to murder?

I picked up this book on a whim, but mostly because for some reason the synopsis reminded me of Dead Poets Society, which is one of my favorite movies. However the story turned out to be darker and very very different than what I expected. Not necessarily in a bad way, though.

The reader follows the narration of the main character, Richard as he joins a mysterious community made up of the five other kids in his Classics class. Richard was a somewhat dull character. There was nothing interesting about him or his voice in telling the story, but I found it to be nice. Richard, to me, represented an average, everyday person, someone with whom the reader can relate to. It makes the other characters seem much more interesting and different in contrast.

The five students who make up the strange club are all very unique, but equally untrustworthy. Even when they seemed like great people, I had a hard time believing everything they said, but I felt like that was how they were supposed to be written, especially Henry. Henry Winter was the most fascinating out of the group. His past remains very secretive throughout the whole book, the author only revealing bits of who he is every once in a while. I still am uncertain how I really feel about him.

I also really enjoyed learning a little bit about Classics as I was reading. Classics and the ancient would are very interesting to me, and reading a book with Classics as a theme was great.

However, there were some trivial problems I found while I was reading. The amount of information the reader receives is unproportional. Some of this probably has to do with Richard's narration, you can only know what he knows or what he finds out, but some was not. There were certain, unimportant things that would be explained and described in tedious detail, while other, way more important things would be somewhat skimmed over in a way that made it hard for me to understand.

Also I mourned the lack of the presence of the character, Julian, the professor. Based on the synopsis, I expected Julian to be a powerful presence in the novel. I imagined him being a John Keating type of influence on the actions of the students, when in reality, he only made an appearance maybe three times in the whole book. But in those cameos, I really liked him, and desperately wished he was a bigger character. I feel like if he had been in it more, I would've been able to understand the actions of the main characters better.

Despite all of this, I did love this book. It was a very dark read, but the writing and descriptions in this book were stunning, and I definitely want to pick up more by Donna Tartt someday.

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.” 
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

There are so many different bookish communities and resources with the advent of the internet and it's a beautiful thing. I could make a whole other post about my thoughts on how the internet has enhanced and changed the way we read because it's so interesting to me.

There are several downsides to social media, which have been talked about extensively by so many people so we're not getting into that today, however, I think one good thing that has come from my own personal social media experience is it has made made me grow a lot as a reader.

Due to my never ending search for books to read, social media has become my main source of book recommendations. And that's not something I'm ashamed of. Sometimes it's hard for me to understand how people used to find books to read before there was social media.

I spend a good amount of my time in the Bookstagram corner of Instagram. I have discovered Bookstagram is an especially great place to find new books I've never heard of before. As you scroll through the explore page, it's so easy to add about a hundred books to your TBR without even realizing it.

Because of my obsession with Instagram and books, I decided to do a fun experiment. I took the first six books that came up on my explore page, and inspired by BooksandLala (one of the most creative booktubers), I read all of them. I went into them all completely blind to see how trustworthy the bookstagram community really is with its recommendations.

because this song kept playing over and over in my head as I was reading

The word "trope" is thrown around all the time in book reviews as if it's a negative thing. Some people tend to think it's something synonymous with the words cliché and unoriginal, like tropes are the sign of a lazy author. However, I do not think this is the case at all. There's absolutely nothing new under the sun. Every act of creativity is simply building off the work of the hundreds of thousands of other creatives that came before it. Tropes are a natural occurrence in the world of literature.

There are established rules for effective storytelling that have been built off of the trials and errors of other writers. With those rules come popular tropes that can be utilized in many ways to tell different stories. While there is nothing unique about certain tropes in and of themselves, the ways in which authors can use them as storytelling tools is what can really make or break their own interpretation in their book.

There are tropes in every single genre and every single demographic. They're unavoidable. Every book utilizes some type of trope in one way or another. Like with every aspect of a book, there's some personal preference over which tropes a reader enjoys, and which ones seem overdone to them. Knowing which tropes and themes you personally love can really help you understand your own reading taste so that you can discover new amazing books.

For me, there are several distinct tropes I love. Sometimes I will put a book on my TBR just because it has one of these tropes without knowing anything else about it. In this post, I'm going to be highlighting eight of my all time favorite tropes.