The Secret History by Donna Tartt

There’s something deeply powerful about this book, and Tartt writes it beautifully and well. But the power of what Tartt has captured goes beyond the story of five friends and what happened to their sixth, and how secrets become a sickness. Tartt published this in 1992, and her canvas for the portraits she paints is the small college campus, an world away but also one so completely a world and culture to itself that it could be interchangeable with another one a coast—or even a nation—away. 

What happened in higher education in the early 90’s—largely through the early years of the S&L crash in the States, but through so many other factors as well—rendered this a last picture of the way things were. By the time contemporary readers meet Richard, our narrator, and his erudite fellows of the Classics, this will seem as though it was written in a culture that is not merely a few decades ago, but from a time of ancient history. The chronology of this work renders the whole even more compelling, though Tartt doesn’t need any help. The Secret History brings friendship and loyalty, identity and inclusion all to the fore, shining a light on the ways in which we build who we are and craft the scaffolds that support our narratives of self. 

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Published by Gerald Duckworth, 1978

I needed more books about books in my life, so I turned to The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. Books themselves have very little place in the overall plot, and that’s all to the good, as well cheer our heroine on as she explores widowhood as an outsider in a tightly-knit, and often closed-minded, small community. 

The book is dryly funny, witty, and compassionate. It’s a fantastic romp while also being a treatise of the power of having enough gumption to follow a dream, even when that feels like an act of resistance.