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i capture the castle

I'm recommending a novel that I started reading for the first time yesterday, so take this with a grain of salt — I'm only a quarter of the way through.
Pride and Prejudice + Jayne Eyre + Bell Jar (maybe?) = too early to really tell, but snappy and delightful and not sure where it is going
Written as journal entries by 17-year-old narrator, published in 1940s

@mattshawsome

Jun 9, 2025

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Pet - catherine chidgey (2023)

I very pathetically and desperately read just about anything promised to appeal for "fans of Gillian Flynn". This is the 1 in 50 that delivers, and not as a rip off or homage, but its own specific dark jewel. Just a riveting and very awful (positive) novel. So rarely does something capture this part of childhood, the very primal and un-socialized us vs. them, me vs. you, jealousy and confused pre-maturity longing and disgust. Crazy!

@killer

Oct 2, 2024

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Books i read in january

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.

@ellynhere

Jan 28, 2025

Top Recs from @mattshawsome

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no video on pi.fyi

this is worthy of celebration: the lack of video—autoplay video, noisy inane video, panicky video, algorithmic, dumb video, rabbit hole video, any video—on pi.fyi is a good thing

@mattshawsome

Oct 5, 2024

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necessary endings

this is going to hurt — A LOT — but it's getting to the point where there's no other option

@mattshawsome

Mar 11, 2025

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realizing that at some point not so long ago you crossed an invisible line and now you're a different person, in a very good way

huh
cool
wow

@mattshawsome

Mar 27, 2025