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Dissociative feminism is out! Bare prose and placid female protagonists be gone! If I am to read fiction I only want the most ornate, decadent, floral of diction. I want something dense, artful and self indulgent. It is good to be more and I need a writer to demonstrate some skill in order to earn a moment of nakedness
Jan 28, 2024
Related Recs
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not the classics (though I love those too), the stuff that was demonized because young women enjoyed it and the stories were emotionally exciting and delightfully implausible
like East Lynne by Ellen Wood
jealousy! love! murder and mystery! details about everyone’s outfits! 💅
Apr 15, 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
by antonia angress, it’s a gorgeous contemporary novel about academia, the messiness of artists trying to survive, and thinks about loneliness openly in a way i haven’t seen before in a novel like this. also, a queer romance plotline :)
Dec 24, 2024
Top Recs from @heidegirl
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if I go somewhere (train station, highway, supermarket) and there are massive screens which play ads on a loop, purposefully bright and loud and situated in a public space I experience this as an evil. It actively harms me. i don’t think we need to go any further than Times Square to find proof that aesthetic value is at least partially grounded in moral value.
Jan 31, 2024
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You are obligated to make a good faith attempt to like your friends boyfriend five separate times. However five times is quite generous of you and if your don’t like them on the sixth occassion it is out of your hands.
Jan 28, 2024
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Pilates + not eating processed foods + minimum 8 hours sleep + no coffee past 12pm… who knew feeling like an anxious, sleepless, over caffeinated mess all the time didn’t have to be the case!
May 23, 2024