Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt — Spoiler-Filled Analysis

[00:00:00]Believe It or Not somehow I still have not read the secret history so that's what we're going to do I am a lover of mysteries and thrillers and it feels kind of crazy that I somehow never ended up picking up the secret history before now so we're going to rectify that today this book was first published in 1992 so it is an older title and I feel like everyone in their mother has read it at this point but somehow I don't have any spoilers for it I barely even know what it's about and I've heard mostly good reviews so I feel like it's time to check it out it does have over 736 th000 ratings on good reads with an average rating of a 4.17 so that does seem pretty promising that's a pretty good average rating and a huge amount of popularity and I feel like when people talk about dark Academia they usually talk about the secret history and dark Academia got really popular especially in the last couple of years I'm not really necessarily drawn to dark Academia stuff I've read a good handful of them I've enjoyed some I haven't enjoyed others so I'm just interested to get a fresh take on this book see what my experience is reading it for the first time and bring you along with me okay I am4 pages in that is the first two chapters of this book these chapters are so long but it is time to do a little First Impressions since I got through the first little chunk of the book and have an idea of what's going on what I was kind of expecting with this what I thought it was about is that someone dies in this friend group in college and maybe they murdered him and that's the mystery that's going to be unraveled throughout the story story which I guess is kind of what's going on you learn in the very beginning that one of the people dies let me lay out the characters for you as I usually do with these dedicated book Vlogs I'm going to make this be a Choose Your Own Adventure like you can watch this with no spoilers or you can watch this with spoilers spoilers will be clearly labeled you can skip over them if you want but we're only 100 pages in which you know sounds like a lot but I'm not nothing's a spoiler yet this is just the setup and who the characters are so nothing in this section is going to be spoilery but just in case you wanted to for the rest of the video so let me go ahead and lay out the characters of the story for anyone who's following along just to set up where we're at so far so our main character is this guy named Richard there's a lot of details about these characters that is given throughout this book it's just very dense you learn a lot about these people I'm just going to tell you what you need to know as we're following along Richard is this guy from California and he decides he wants to go off to this college in Vermont because he thought the brochure looked nice basically is the long and short of it and so he ends up at this college and he goes and he plans to study something in particular but he's also had like some experience learning the Greek language and he has to have some language courses so he decides he wants to enroll in the Greek classes but then he learns about this professor named Julian who is this kind of like enigmatic character at this University Julian teaches the Greek courses but he's very particular and his advisor is like you probably shouldn't even try to get into his class but that is a challenge that Richard wants to take on so he ends up getting pulled into this environment where he's taking these classes with Julian what that means is that he has to drop all his other classes he's going to take all his classes from Julian cuz that's the particular way he likes to do things he'll be learning Greek but also be learning things like philosophy and you know whatever else and Julian only admits a very select group of people in his courses so there's like six of them now with Richard joining the fold the other characters you're following are the other students who are a student of Julian you have Henry who is really rich and kind of grumpy he also is really into language and translation and he seems like he's really smart but he has a very pretentious air about him as many of these people do he doesn't believe in the Aesthetics of standardized testing for example so he didn't never take his sat like he's just a little bit annoying then you have bunny and bunny is the one that you know in the very beginning is the one who ends up dead he is kind of Larger than Life very loud very boisterous and he likes to take advantage of people there's a guy named Francis and honestly you don't really know a lot about Francis yet except for he's the kind of gangly looking one I think and then there are these twins Charles and Camila and also I don't feel like you know a lot about Charles and Camila yet Camila just stands out because she's the only woman in the group so that's the group of students and as Richard is joining them he is very much an outsider to their group they clearly have a lot of connections and history together and he's kind of trying to make his way in and you're following this first little bit of their time together as he's spending some time with them getting to know them trying to make his way in but realizing there's still some things they're doing that they aren't inviting him on and he's starting to observe these weird behaviors that they do and the weird ways that they interact with Julian and he's trying to piece it all together but like I said The Story begins and you know that bunny has died so the story is also being told to you from Richard after all this has happened and it's in the voice of like oh when I reflect on these things and like these things are kind of fuzzy so it's like you're hearing from him how he remembers all of this going down how I'm feeling so far it's going okay I'm intrigued it is very densely written and I'm just like struggling a little bit with that there's a part of me that wants to just really enjoy this book and really just like let all the sophisticated language take me in but most of me just feels that pretentiousness and isn't like super drawn to that as my favorite thing so it's going fine so far I've been a little bit confused at times but I'm just letting that take me on the journey as I'm trying to clear things up and figure out who people are and what's happening and where the direction of the story is going and it seems like it's going to be about whatever weird things and beliefs this Julian guy has that he is embedding in this group and how that's affecting them and all their different beliefs about life and how that's going to be taken too far and then lead to bunny being dead it's also been funny that things this reminds me of like clearly this came first before these other things but I can see so much inspiration that was taken from this into those other things like for one the most obvious one maybe is bunny by Mona aad that is a dark Academia story it follows a very similar kind of setup where there's this group of these people there's an outsider trying to get in they are doing some weird things that she's going to discover along the way and they call each other bunny so that just feels so tightly tied to this book being an inspiration for that which is interesting to see like now going back years later I read a bunny years ago and now seeing like oh I can see how a lot of this would have inspired what mono wad chose to do with that story and more recently the movie saltburn I just I feel like I'm seeing saltburn on the page with the college parties and the people and their pretentiousness but the energy about them and these like big sweeping Estates and just like hanging out in the sun and the things that they're doing with their time so it's really funny to now look back and be like oh if I would have read this years ago I would have seen this and so many things that I've read and watched since this has come out so early Impressions I'm not like obsessed and in love with this I didn't know if I would be it just seems like something people are really passionate about I don't know if I'm going to become more interested in it as it goes goes on it might just be I'm not clicking with the pretentiousness that is on purpose and that is a staple of the dark Academia kind of style and general but I'm intrigued enough I'm curious to see where it goes I'm getting more into the writing style as I keep moving through it and I will let you know my further opinions as I get further in the text I don't see an end to it I don't know what would happen if my parents got disgusted and cut me off which is extremely likely to happen at some point in the near future if things go on as they are progress we're making progress I'm 172 pages in that's the start of chapter 5 these are the longest chapters I've ever experienced in my life it's time for another update non-spoilery first I'm having such a roller coaster experience with this book I will have moments where I feel like I'm getting in the groove with it where I'm really intrigued I feel like the plot's moving things are getting interesting but then there's these long stretches sometimes that feel so boring to me and they're so wordy and I'm just like God I can't wait to get to the next thing so that's not the most fun experience to be very like on and off having fun not having fun having fun not having fun for me I think it's the pieces that become really long like inner monologue Exposition diary writing type of writing where Richard is reflecting on a long period of something happening and he just takes the longest time to explain it that anyone has ever explained anything those parts drag on for me I really like when we get the characters together when there's dialogue when there's things being said when the plot is moving forward those pieces I find very interesting the other pieces not so interesting so it's a little rough going I am going to try out the audio book for the first time today I haven't tried it out yet but I'm moving so slowly through this book I'm like I'm going to have to like incorporate some audiobook time in my day to get through this as well and so I'm curious to see how that maybe affects my experience with those longer Parts like maybe that helps it feel more flowy in my brain hearing it versus like staring at these really long chunky paragraphs full of small tiny text on on the page to go into some quick little spoilers of what's happened in the first four chapters of the book and how I'm feeling about it it is getting more interesting in a spoilery sense of what's happening so last we spoke I told you about all the characters and how Richard was trying to get in with them and become friends with them and kind of a little bit of a glimpse of what each of them was like I do feel like I have a better grasp of Henry and of bunny at this point they feel more like characters to me I've learned more about them bunny is just very interesting character very obnoxious acts like he has all this money doesn't really have any money and he's very proud I would say that is a good word to describe him Henry is a pretty complex character so far he's got more to him than it looks like and that's something bunny says to Richard as well he's like you think you got Henry figured out but you haven't and I think that makes a character really interesting so I really like getting to understand more about Henry what happened in this segment of the book is that we come upon the winter holidays and so everyone kind of has their own plans Henry and Bunny are planning to go to Rome Camila and Charles are going to stay with their uncle and work with him or something Francis is going somewhere else and so Richard is left all alone and he doesn't have anywhere to live and he doesn't have money so he ends up buming off of a hippie in the area that was kind of weird and random but he lives with some hippie and he lives in this like terrible house with no Heating and there's a hole in the roof and he almost freezes to death in this section and it's just a really long portion of him being really cold cold in the winter being alone in this guy's house walking back and forth to go work for another professor over this time period and that is just the thing that drags on I was like oh my God come on get me out of this but then Henry ends up surprisingly returning early from Rome without bunny he comes a little earlier and Henry kind of rescues him and takes him into his apartment and helps heal him he actually takes him in the hospital first because it turns out Richard got pneumonia he ended up really sick from being so cold and so Henry kind of nurses him back to health and in this time he's spending with Henry he's curious like why Henry came back from Rome earlier what happened with bunny what's going on there and there's this sense of eeriness like something weird is going on and then finally the group does get back from winter break and then Henry Camila Charles and Francis are all kind of Mi a little bit like they don't really know where they are and that's when bunny is kind of talking to Richard more and that's when he's kind of like you know Henry is a little more complex than you think but Bunny's also just not like saying anything out front he won't like say what happened and why Henry left Rome earlier and Richard even starts thinking like did Henry make a pass at Bunny and bunny is such a homophobe and that freaked him out and all these things and like I was kind of thinking that too as the reader but no it turns out what happened is that the group of them they have been interested and this is what the weirdness has been all along they have been trying to like have a Divine experience basically uh Henry describes it as having a banol which is like a Greek Rome kind of thing where you get really drunk and engage in wild rry and try to communicate with Divine and so that's why they've been like boiling leaves and trying to like get drunk enough to get to that space get high enough to get to that space so they've been doing weird for a long time trying to have this kind of experience and it turns out that they did that and then they ended up killing a man so they were going to flee to Argentina they were getting oneway tickets to go to Argentina but then they decided not to because like Camila and Charles couldn't find their passport and whatever I guess they've kind of gotten away with the murder at this point and now bunny is like being annoying about it rightfully so question Mark and so what I think it's leading to is that bunny doesn't like I don't know if bunny was like a part of the killing someone I think he was a part of like all the partying and things but bunny isn't going to let it go obviously and so I think that's what's going to lead into you know we know bunny ends up dead sounds like they're going to want to kill bunny because he won't shut up about the fact that they killed someone so that's getting more interesting it's getting more dark and it's getting darker faster than I expected it to at this part of the book so now I'm like well where's the rest of the story going to go like we know bunny dies now we kind of understand a motive what we're going to do with the rest of these hundreds of pages but at least the story is picking up and I'm getting more [Music] intrigued I have made it to book two I'm 275 pages in this is chapter 6 and I don't really have that much more to say this is such a a slow burn I made it to chapter 7 last night I'm 67% of the way through the book it's taking forever I am liking it less and less as I go along also the audio book experience horrible absolutely horrible time not that the audio book is horrible I mean it kind of is there's like the staticky sound in the background the whole time so if you're someone who uses like earphones and you can hear the audio really closely while you're listening to the Audi book it might drive you nuts but also the book and the audio book isn't sectioned out the same way that the chapters are in here so if you like switch back and forth between physical and audio it's going to be hard to keep up with where you are if you sit the book down listen on audio for an hour and then try to figure out where you are in the book because the chapters and the parts in the book they don't align at least not the audio book I'm listening to on Libby and the cover looks exactly the same as this so I feel like it I like I don't know how many variations could be out there it's so boring nothing is happening and it just is using so many words to barely move the plot I am determined to finish it today I will do whatever it takes to be done with this I did it I finished I don't have the emotional or mental capacity to talk about it right now I'll check in with you when I do I took some time to sit on this book to be done with it to process and I just didn't want to talk about it as soon as I finished it because I was just pushing so hard to get to the end I was like I need to just be away from it for a minute so it's been a couple hours and now we can talk about my final experience with the secret history in general I don't get it I don't get why this book is so beloved really not a lot happens it's really drawn out it's really wordy and frankly it's kind of just boring I will be giving this a two star for my final rating I just did not really enjoy it it was okay the story was okay there just wasn't a lot here for me to like it's really not much of a mystery because the Story begins and you know that bunny was murdered by this group of friends and then the whole story is just going back in time leading up to the events and then some of the events after Bunny's death the story also begins you know from Richard's perspective and he's reflecting on his fatal flaw being relating to Aesthetics I can't remember exactly how he phrased it but something about like he get so caught up in the look of things that he's not always seeing them for what they really are which is kind of the message of the book as he's reflecting on his experience that's his life lesson that he's learned through this and then he's reflecting on this experience he had with this group of friends that he made that he spent very little time with and the grand scheme of things and then what happened to them over the course of a couple months when I read things like this I do always get really really interested in what people like about them so much when I don't like it so I will be diving into more reviews listening to people's videos I want to hear people's thoughts on this I want to know what they like so much about it if you are a lover of this book you can comment down below and let me know what you love about it as well I am curious to see that side of things but personally for me I just didn't really get it I had such high hopes for this I've been building it up in my mind for a long time time it was one of the back list books I really wanted to get to this year I just like had an idea of this book when I looked at it when I thought of it I just had this expectation in my mind and it was just so underwhelming to me because of everything I thought that it might be which is unfortunate for some final spoilers on what goes on in this book spoiler Banner on the screen skip this part if you do not want to know the tldr of this book can be summarized so very quickly there's a group of friends bunny dies it's because they killed him why did they do that it's because they were trying to have these bachan alls they were trying to reach these moments of the Divine getting drunk partying and they accidentally ended up killing a guy this was before bunny died they killed a guy we talked about this already and none of them were really bothered by the fact that they killed that guy except bunny was upset about it bunny wasn't there when they killed the guy bunny was back at Henry's place and then they all got back and they're all bloody and then he ends up piecing together what happened because he sees a newspaper article about a guy who died he's like oh my God you guys killed that guy and so bunny starts taking advant Vantage of them and is like taking all of their money and like making them feel uncomfortable so that they have to like pay for all these fancy dinners and things for him to keep him a peas so he won't go blabbing on about the fact that they killed someone and then eventually they're like well I guess we've just got to kill Bunny and so they take bunny out to the cliff they do all this orchestrating all this planning they take him out there with Richard and they kill bunny after that the rest of the book is just them suffering the consequences of that they're all kind of deteriorating in different ways Charles starts drinking a lot he's drunk all the time Francis starts having panic attacks he thinks he's having a heart attack and dying but he's having panic attacks and then I think by the end of the book he tries to kill himself at one point it's either him or Charles one of them tries to kill thems Camila's all messed up about it Henry's getting really weird and just doing a bunch of weird things and that just drags on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on they go to his funeral things feel weird now that they're around his family and then they get in this whole situation Julian finds out what happened that they killed the person and then presumes that they killed Bunny and then he just kind of disappears Julian does not become as big of a character in the story as I as I thought he would and then there's this situation and they're all like in a fuss in a fight in a fury Henry has a gun Henry ends up killing himself and then that's kind of it the group dissolves they all go on about their own lives um and Richard realizes this thing but he's like oh I get so caught up in the Aesthetics of things that I never see them for what they really are he learns things about them along on the way like camil and Charles were totally sleeping together even though they're twin brother and sister and Henry was definitely taking advantage of him and manipulated him to even have Richard find out that they killed that guy so that they could kind of use him as a scapegoat so he comes to all these reflections of like oh these people like were doing all these horrible things and I wasn't paying attention to any of it cuz I just thought they were cool and I wanted to be one of their friends that's it that's the book summarized I found it so boring so underwhelming there really wasn't any suspense or tension for me in seeing the unraveling of this and it just felt so wordy and it felt so so long to get through some of these scenes and once they're all deteriorating and they're feeling anxious and all these things are happening I'm like yeah of course yeah this is playing out because you know you keep killing people so of course it's going to affect you in some way it did surprise me when Henry killed himself like I wasn't expecting that but I don't know that didn't feel like a big plot surprise we kind of just then move on from it and then you know move on into the epilog and they drift away and that's it I don't have much more to say about it honestly in the spoiler section because it's really fast to sum up and I don't have many specific thoughts feelings or things to nitpick I just found it kind of boring so that is it for my final thoughts on the secret history let me know down in the comments below if you've read this book before whether you loved it or hated it let me know what you think about it let me know if I've made you curious to pick it up on your own or if you've decided that maybe it's not so worth your time and you're just going to listen to the spoilers and not end up picking it up I will also note that as I've begun to look more into this book I'm looking for like reviews starting to dive in I want to hear other people's thoughts about it I have seen a series of things about Donna tart uh the author of this and problematic Behavior especially in her book The Gold Finch and that being like ridiculously racist and offensive and harmful and painful to people so this is definitely not an author I'm going to Care to pick up any other books from in the future especially because I found this book so boring and because I'm hearing such awful things about The Goldfinch so maybe just a word of caution uh if you're watching this video and you're starting to poke around you're interested and you're thinking about picking up the author sounds like she's not a great person to support anyways so disclaimer here on the end as I'm learning these things in the video I didn't even think this book was that great anyways so save your time save your money save your support for better books and better people and on that note I will be saying goodbye thank you so much for watching and I'll see you all in my next video bye [Music]