The Secret History, Donna Tartt... I thought it was about time travel

The be strong quote is actually Homer. Which makes it even more pretentious

I adore this book. I read it when I was the protagonists' age and frankly couldn't have been more up myself if I'd tried, & I just coveted everything. Amazingly I still love it 25 years later!

Apparently they're making a film of The Goldfinch. It'll be a damn good director who gets the mood of the Vegas bit right.

I agree entirely about the haunting wonderfulness/awfulness of the Vegas section. There's just such a pervasive sense of loss in the whole book - that grief, that loss, is so authentic and perfectly conveyed. And yes, I cared about the dog.

Yes i agree that it was exactly the setting that is normally so painful and boring for the old cliched teen-scene but for me she made it some how magical, sort of suspended and eerie with as scribble says that horrible sense of something nasty coming.

It was boring (what Theo and his odd friend whose name I have forgotten were up to) but it was that horrible menacing boredom that just kept building and building and you just knew something awful was going to happen. Gave me the absolute delicious willies. Like someone sat out in my garage playing creepy minor arpeggios on a cello.

scribbly at fictional children trumping real ones. I have unintentionally done that a few times involving an undignified race down the road. I knew I wasn’t as invested as I should be in the story when I wasn’t even bothered about what happened to the dog! Still he got back to Hogwarts ok in the end. I loved the beginning but the Vegas bit sucked the life out of it for me. I do find what they were mainly doing in Vegas very boring as a storyline in novels/movies in general, especially involving teens so that was possibly something to do with it.

"I think I was more invested with the safety of the dog than that of Theo"

Oh yes, me too ScribblyGum

Although thinking about it I think I was more invested with the safety of the dog than that of Theo.

giddyup and Satsuki the escape from Vegas scene was one of only two times during the period of my life when I had primary school children when I thought (to my shame) ‘They are just going to have to WAIT’ and purposefully was late for pick up as I had to keep reading to find out what happened. The other was the escape in Room.

Fictional children escaping horrid places trumps collecting my own rl children on time.

giddyupnow lol at your alternate ending

I adore this book - but then I can't deal with time travel! 😊😁

Haha, and I’m also always all ‘omg, such perfect, suspenseful plotting and delivery with secret history, how could any writer ever follow her’ and it is tickling me greatly that others at same point were like ‘yawn, god, when will it END, oh and she should’ve totally put in the time travel and Julian should’ve done it.’

In my stalking of DT I’m sure I read that there was a lot more of Julian in the original draft - maybe she just took out a chunk where he shot them all and then jumped in a capsule and whisked off to Ancient Greece. #alternateendings

satsuki that’s exactly what I mean about how odd reading is, I can totally get why people don’t like her (I think), but that Vegas bit is one of the only bits I have read in years that put me into that weird trance-like state where I couldn’t have cared less about what happened to anyone in real world and was all shivery with tension. Why does different writing affect different people in different ways so dramatically?! It’s so weird.

I read this recently after reading rave reviews on here. I regularly wondered if I was reading the same book as everyone else. I found it slow going, tedious, pretentious and it was a relief to get to the end!
I didn't care about any of the characters, what they had done. I expected the professor to be somehow involved and that there would be a twist - yawn.
I read A LOT of books and very happy to pay for them. Biggest waste of £7 in a long time!

I loved this book - one of my top 10. I wasn't disappointed by the lack of time travel, but that's probably because I didn't expect any . Although I may now have to read it again on the pretext of looking for where the time travel theme should have been included

I loved The Goldfinch too but not as much as The Secret History.

I may be able to finally persuade DP to read it if I tell him it involves time travel! He loves Margaret Atwood because I sold him on the sci-fi themes of Oryx & Crake. He read it, loved it and now he's read almost all of them.

One of my favourite books of all time - I read it in the 90s also. I've never re-read it - I think the suspense she creates is amazing and that's the strength of the book, IMHO - but you could never recreate that feeling during a re-read. However, if you've not been grabbed by it so far I'd probably ditch it - life's too short!

It is so weird how things affect different people differently, the bus bit was when I nearly gave up because I didn’t care any more! I quite liked it overall, that all being said

I literally just read it after wanting to read it for ages. I hated it! It’s so slow!!

I think The Secret History has one of the best descriptions of feeling very cold I have ever read. It’s the first thing I think of when anyone mentions that book, Richard being very cold in his crappy loft.

I'm with you giddyup I loved the Vegas section in The Goldfinch, and the leaving Vegas on the bus bit, dear Lord, I had the sweaty armpits of tension.

giddyup that Vegas sequence was one of the dullest things I’ve ever read, it would have gone across the room if it hadn’t been on Kindle. Then again perhaps I was just disappointed it wasn’t about birdwatching...

I also thought it was about time travel. I read it. It wasn't about time travel. I even scoured the internet to see if I'd missed some subtle plot where it actually was about time travel but I'd been too thick to recognise that.

Nope, it wasn't.

It was still a very good book. But, not about time travel.

One of my favs too! Though not read for a while... may give an audio book a go now I think about it?!

hassled, I’m not sure if the goldfinch is better for me, but that whole Vegas sequence is one of the most memorable and haunting I’ve ever read.

This is such a funny thread, it is one of my favourite books evaaaaa and I have read it at least five times! I also made my husband go and tour Bennington and am obsessed with her in general. It literally grabbed me from the first sentence / paragraph / page and I consider it almost a perfect book. I love how it is sort of so audacious in its unashamed pretentiousness! She’s just like, fuck you guys, I’m 25 and if I want to write about high culture and a bunch of knobbish students, I will, and earn millions doing it.

I hasten to add I love lots of commercial fiction, it’s not the snob factor that appeals, but isn’t it so funny about books how what for one person is completely spell-binding for the next is just utter bilge? I remember wanting to throw Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth across the room.