this book is such a wild ride from vigorous indulgence to immaturity banging up against reality to a gorgeous love story and war and religion and loss and loneliness.
First time through this book, I couldn't get enough of Charles's and Sebastian's college partying and their deep friendship/romance.
The last time through, I absolutely lost myself in Charles's adult love story, climaxing onboard the ship.
And then this line:
Our two lives, so long widely separate, now being knit to one.
it's also really funny—there's a lot of good dry humor all the way through
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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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Read this for the second time recently and I’ve realized how much I love it. Such a beautiful and complex novel about how love is a strange thing, especially when you live in Victorian England.
2d ago
SUCH a wild ride, we’ve got an affair, a celeb psychic medium, an inter-dimensional cloud of ancestral grief, a failing marriage (and a pregnancy), the Russian Revolution, generational trauma, Soviet orphanages, and at least three questionable women —I feel like this is a superb book for the Moshfegh, batuman, emma cline, Mona Awad crowds
Apr 30, 2024
Top Recs from @ttwardz
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enjoy a fun little moment of loud satisfying destruction
Mar 8, 2024
these two sentences hit me harder than I ever expected
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.
Feb 28, 2024