The most gorgeous book I’ve ever read; beautiful; sexy; heartbreaking
Winterson is the best!!!
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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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Greedy: notes from a bisexual who wants too much, by jen winston. its so amazing.
Apr 17, 2024
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This is one of the best books I read the year it came out— it’s originally in French, and is the first of a quartet, but can be read alone. The elaborate world building is such a satisfying contrast to characters that are hyperreal and it was such a beautiful read; I sat with it a long time after I’d finished, and I think it fits the brief of “blow your mind” very well.
Mar 12, 2024
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So tranquil so beautiful! Nothing quite like it!
Feb 25, 2025
Watched this movie every single weekend at my nana’s house because she had it saved to her dvr. Gave me an extreme desire for independence at a very young age (it has carried me through to today!) and inspired me to make pancakes (waffles) on my own every week as a spry 6 year old.
2d ago
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I used to love it and I forgot about it for years until I went to my parents house where my mom was stocked up on ot. Every morning for breakfast I have a bowl of cottage cheese with a blended apple (think like fresh apple sauce) and cinnamon and go to town! Keeps me full most of the morning which is great because getting hungry right after breakfast when I am on the run is not fun
Jan 24, 2025