The Secret History - By Donna Tartt
The Secret History by Donna Tartt is an older book (published in 1992) that, somehow, I missed when it first came out. It is the perfect Fall Seasonal read, set in elite Hampden College in Hampden,Vermont. The aesthetic is tweed coats, wooden-panelled private clubs, old books and libraries - what Pinterest would classify as Dark Academia. From a literary perspective, it has been called Neo-Romanticism. What could be more Autumnal than that? "It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don't know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen." The story begins, similarly to The Glass Hotel , another inverted detective story, by telling you that someone has been murdered. You know who, you even know how, but you read on to know why. Narrated by outsider/loner Richard, you also are drawn into the world of the close knit and mysterious
