Secret History

I haven't read it for ages but I know your pain :)

Is she going to publish a new book this century?

It would have been better if they just thought they killed the farmer, and he really came back and hunted them down one by one a la I Know What You Did Last Summer. I would have been pleased to see those annoying kids picked off.

So yeah, read this. I liked it. I felt like it lost its way a bit later in the book, like maybe it could have finished in about 100 fewer pages (I especially found that there was too much description of the Bunny family/funeral stuff, which I found very flat). But overall good.

I had a professor very much like Julian so that brought another level of enjoyment.

Procopius, in his Secret History indulges in quite a lot of scurrilous rumor-mongering about the Empress Theodora and Emperor Justinian, but because there are so few reliable sources for that period in Byzantine history, most post-Renaissance historians have been content to accept his rumors at near to face value without secondary sources, simply because they sympathize with anyone who writes history more quickly than with his subjects.

For myself, the plausibility of his tittle-tattle about orgies, palace intrigue and murder are not sufficient to secure my whole-hearted belief. There is as much malice in the governed as in the governing and at this late date is is hard to sift between them.

sometimes i just want to read something else like this book not because i loved it but because it was gripping & had such a tone and mood you could be absorbed by. i liked the second one, too, & think her next one is apparently not so far away.

the parts about the guy's deathly, lonesome winter are good iirc.

Need to read this again really, did love it the first time around, when I was not so much older than the protagonists. I think identifying with them - if not entirely sympathising - probably contributes a good deal to the book's charm. Found The Little Friend to be a big slog but still looking forward to her next one, if the publishing dates are to be believed then she's sticking rigidly to a one novel every ten years cycle.

sometimes i just want to read something else like this book not because i loved it but because it was gripping & had such a tone and mood you could be absorbed by. i liked the second one, too, & think her next one is apparently not so far away.

the parts about the guy's deathly, lonesome winter are good iirc.

― honest weights, square dealings (schlump), Saturday, October 8, 2011 6:41 AM Bookmark

Yeah, I loved this part. Really it's not a thriller so much as a novel of decline/decay.

Found The Little Friend to be a big slog but still looking forward to her next one

SPOOOOOOOILLLLLLLLLLEERRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz:

it isn't like i've re-read it or anything but i assume, when i think of that book, that its rep & that it suffered are because of the shaggy dog story element to it; that it pitched itself as a mystery & wasn't, then a mystery, but at that point it clearly wasn't about being a mystery it was about being a vivid portrait of a time & a family & a time in a family &c&c&c. and so the kind of thing you might get disappointed at, on account of how your expectations are primed, but which is meritous in itself. i liked it.