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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
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Feb 11, 2025
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Wanted to share some 5star reads 🤡
1) they’re going to love you - Meg howry
2) biography of X - Catherine Lacey
thats All tbh. 🫶🏻 I think I love this little life
Apr 11, 2024
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1. House on the cerulean sea 🌊 This book is a great one to read going into spring. It’s so heart warming!! it makes me feel so happy and ready to appreciate life.
2. The opposite of loneliness ☀️ this book is a collection of fiction and non fiction essays from a girl who died right after graduating. I really like her work, the fiction feels creative and fun and the non fiction feels personal no matter what age I read it.
3. Bad Summer People 🏓 horny rich people play tennis over the summer and make bad choices! Quick read, gets me in the mood to keep reading more and more.
Mar 2, 2024
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By far the best makeup remover/moisturizer ever created. Been hooked on it since I was old enough to wear makeup, there’s simply nothing better.
Even on lazy days, if this is the only thing I do to my skin at night I still wake up with moisturized, glowing skin.
Feb 19, 2025