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Just finished my re-read of this one. Just utterly sweet and lovely and life-affirming. Plus it's endlessly entertaining!
Jan 22, 2024
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The year is off to a sumptuous and riotous start with these three novels, each containing some of the most glorious, delicious, nostalgic, aching, and poetically articulate turns of phrase I’ve ever been lucky enough to absorb.
1. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Prose: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Heart: ❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹
Intellectual Stimulation: 🧠🧠🧠🧠
I devoured this in about a week. Waugh’s prose is some of the finest I’ve ever come across. A nostalgic wine-soaked novel that follows the lives of a couple of privileged Oxbridge students in the 1920s/30s. A love letter to the things that used to be so big and full, and are now decayed.
Some favorite quotes:
“The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly—perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless.”
“But I had no mind for these smooth things; instead, fear worked like yeast in my thoughts, and the fermentation brought to the surface, in great gobs of scum, the images of disaster.”
2. Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Prose: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Heart: ❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹
Intellectual Stimulation: 🧠🧠🧠
Yearning!!! Gilded Age New York City!!! High society mean girls and soft bois!!!
Wharton spent her high society years in New York City during the Gilded Age which makes reading her novels set in this time period so thrilling because she was writing directly from experience. Rustling silks and satins and candlelight and calling cards and yellow roses and hair and gloves and the opera and love notes and yearning glances and upstate New York and Park Avenue. GIMME IT!
3. Atonement by Ian McEwan
Prose: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Heart: ❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹
Intellectual Stimulation: 🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠
This entire book is an utterly magnificent, staggering masterpiece. I love the movie and it was a treat to discover it is very faithful to the book. I think I would re-read Atonement before I would re-watch the movie, simply because McEwan’s prose is perhaps the greatest of any living author.
I simply don’t understand how one person is able to articulate so many rippling, shimmering ideas and emotions with such economy, clarity and poetry. Perfection. Read it.
Jan 28, 2025
Had me in tears on my red eye flight this morning!
A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she will return home. In the strangers' house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care.
It is a quiet novella (and only 88 pages) but there is so much life and tenderness in the small details. Immediate re-read.
Mar 28, 2024
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it is genuinely very funny and sweet and gay and I Adored It
Feb 26, 2024
