The Secret History was good but did take longer than I wanted to get to the good stuff (everything that occurs after Bunny's murder). There's not a thing wrong with that, but I wasn't personally feeling it until Part 2.

Tartt's reading, however, was delightful.

The opening pages then were very disorienting. To find that rather than a centuries-spanning occult epic, I was reading instead a story of '80s college students murdering a friend prompted by motives of self-preservation and, honestly, annoyance -- well, that was a surprise.

Interestingly, The Secret History wasn't remotely what I thought it was going to be. I was familiar with Jean-Pierre Pecau et al's Secret History, a story about four immortals shaping history across the ages; and I'd just assumed that Tartt's book of same name was the source material for that comic.

In Secret History, we don't care about whether the murderous friends get caught but our interest sits wholly in a) watching their dissolution and b) sitting in on Richard waxing thoughtful in his years-later narration.

In The Talented Mr Ripley, Highsmith keeps things taut post-murder with the thrills of wondering whether Ripley will ultimately get away with it or will his hubris be his undoing.

It does also underscore how much things have shifted culturally in terms of being able to talk about and identify symptoms of depression. A lot of bad things have grown up in the last 30 years but then there's some good things too; artists having the vocabulary to describe their struggles is huge 😊

It rather quickly turned into this:

This piece by Sharp as retrospective really put that run in focus for me. I didn't appreciate the shift at the time, being 20yo and perhaps overly invested in Hulk's involvement with Pantheon, but I should probably pull out those issues for revisitation. liamsharp.substack.com/p/surviving-...

I read them in Starbucks or wherever I'm eating lunch. Sometimes in my front yard

😮

I didn't even know people had either of those for Thanksgiving!

Damn, if this was *anywhere* in California, I would drive there for sure.