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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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this book is such a wild ride from vigorous indulgence to immaturity banging up against reality to a gorgeous love story and war and religion and loss and loneliness.
First time through this book, I couldn't get enough of Charles's and Sebastian's college partying and their deep friendship/romance.
The last time through, I absolutely lost myself in Charles's adult love story, climaxing onboard the ship.
And then this line:
Our two lives, so long widely separate, now being knit to one.
it's also really funny—there's a lot of good dry humor all the way through
Jun 11, 2025
♣️
The most gorgeous book I’ve ever read; beautiful; sexy; heartbreaking
Winterson is the best!!!
Feb 11, 2025
😃
Read this for the second time recently and I’ve realized how much I love it. Such a beautiful and complex novel about how love is a strange thing, especially when you live in Victorian England.
Jun 12, 2025
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Mar 6, 2025
Jan 27, 2025
I’m here for the summer doing a play at the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket. My wish when I first arrived was for time to pass slowly.
For a month now, i find myself able to wake up with the dawn chorus, go for long walks and runs without my AirPods, work out regularly, and sit in the sunshine in silence, soaking up the peace one breath at a time.
I’ve never been healthier, more rested, or had better hair.
I’m already nostalgic for this contract.
5d ago