Wounds Of The Earth

I would give anything to read about the winter Bunny and Henry spend together in Rome. Please. Just two hundred pages of Bunny eating gelato and annoying the ever living shit out of Henry. Please. That’s all I want.

Guess What?

It’s Barricade Day so time for another emotional watching Les Mis!

i have a book i bought for £2 in this amazing bookshop in my mum’s hometown and i discovered its 105 years old, from the Cambridge printing press, it’s a collection of Percy Shelley poems AND it has little annotations on some poems and i love it so much

Here, a cheater course on caring for natural fibers!

1. Wool. Treat it like it has the delicate constitution of a Victorian lady and the conviction that baths are evil of a 17th century noble. (If I get in WATER my PORES will OPEN and I will CATCH ILL AND DIE.)

2. Cotton; easygoing. Will shrink a bit if washed and dried hot.

3. Silk; people think it’s like wool and has the constitution of a fashionably dying of consumption Victorian lady, but actually it’s quite tough. Can be washed in an ordinary washer, and either tumbled dry without heat or hung to dry.

4. Linen; it doesn’t give a shit. Beat the hell out of it. Historically was laundered by dousing it in lye and beating the shit out of it with wooden paddles, which only makes it look better. The masochist of the natural fiber world. Beat the fuck out of it linen doesn’t care. Considerably stronger than cotton. Linen sheet sets can last literal decades in more or less pristine shape because of that strength.The most likely natural fiber to own a ball gag.

If anyone did this to me I would immediately fall in love you

how to love a dark academic:

• write them letters and seal the envelopes with fancy wax seals

• buy them books

• write them poetry

• quote shakespeare, or really any other author or playwright to them

• read and discuss books with them

• listen to their 3 am rants on how we could've heard oscar wilde's voice if he'd had lived just a tad longer

• help them study

i know i can't argue with reality here but it's devastatingly unromantic that blood transfusions only work if you have compatible blood types

i really am living out my dark academic les mis vibes life rn aren’t i???

studying history, literature, classics and politics ?! at a new college where i know very little people and very little people know me?!

i’m the whole package baby

Why we should stop comparing The Secret History and If We Were Villains

I've seen people putting the two books together as pillars of dark academia countless times, often trying to explain why their favourite one is the best and it is useless. The two books are incredibly different and you will inevitably be disappointed in one of the two if you read them with the same intentions.

The Secret History is a reversed mystery novel: from the very first lines, we know who died, how, and who killed him. The questions we are left with are "Why did they do that?", and "Will they get away with that?" The book is fundamentally psychological, it's a character-driven book, which explains why such a long part is dedicated to establishing them, their relationships, while the actual murder is surprisingly short.

If We Were Villains, on the other hand, is a more traditional detective novel, though it doesn't totally fit the standard. It's a whodunit, and when we start the book, we know who got arrested but the mystery throughout the novel follows four questions: "Who died?", "Who did it?", "Why did they do it?" and "Why did Oliver get arrested?" We are trying to solve the murder at the same time as the detective. It's a plot-driven novel, and although the characters are very important, they are all defined by one quality and one flaw during the first act (the characterisation in this book is amazing, I'm probably gonna make a post about it).

Obviously, if you read TSH and IWWV with the same expectations, one of them is going to bore you. However, if you consider their differences, they are both excellent books in their genre. If they do have some common elements (a group of students that's almost sectarian, and murder), saying that IWWV plagiarized TSH sounds pretty ridiculous to me. IWWV is a love letter to Shakespeare and the madness in his characters, TSH is a critic of elitism in academic spaces. And they both deserve praise, if only people would stop comparing them.

i have a lit essay due tuesday and i still haven’t finished it i’m currently procrastinating cos idk what to put well i do i just don’t know how to put it or expand

yay

How to make a book yours

put your name as well as the place and date you got it on the first page

if it’s a gift - ask the person who got it for you to write a few words on the first page

carry it in your purse wherever you go, until the edges are worn and the pages stained with tea and raindrops

put on lipstick and kiss a page - the first page, or your favourite page, whichever feels right

underline quotes you love, take notes in the columns

dog-ear your favourite pages or use sticky notes to mark them

spray it with the perfume you wore while reading it - scent is one of our most potent senses and this will link the book in a specific time period of your life (might affect your other books though, so be careful and don’t spray the cover)

write down your impressions on the last few pages right after finishing the book

use a piece of paper with some significance as a bookmark and leave it in the book - I like to use art postcards I get from museum’s shops