A girl with a face like eager flame who was dressed with a maddening perversity of wrongness, but who one day would undoubtedly hold the world in her hands for good or evil.

postcard’s self-indulgent literature rec lists: novels 

i occasionally get sent asks asking me for recs, well, this might be a series, might not, (it took forever), but if there’s one thing you can say about me it’s that i read a lot of books and i want to share. so if you need something to read, or you need something for someone else to read, i encourage you to have a look at this, because, hell, you might not agree with my taste but there are some good fucking books on here, and a good fucking book is something everyone needs.

guest spot of recs by jizzy, who is also an english student with a lot of feelings about books and i asked her to check if i missed any and then it just snowballed.

btw, if you can get the book online, to my knowledge, it’s linked, because i wanted some books that anyone reading this could get for free. if not, it’s the wikipedia slash any resource i could find.

(i bet you wish you’d never asked, now.)

postcard’s top ten

1. the age of innocence - edith wharton

it’s new york city in the 1870’s and newland archer is a wealthy, selfish young man who is about to fall foul of upper class society’s vicious condemnation of anything that steps outside the boundaries of “acceptable” morality— or, at least, gets caught. he loves the “disgraced” beauty countess olenska and is engaged to marry the naive may welland, and, whichever one he chooses, his life will be destroyed.

2. lolita - vladimir nabokov

the most beautiful novel ever written in the english language, lolita is a fourteen year old orphan who is embroiled in a bitter, deeply abusive paedophiliac relationship with the novel’s narrator, the cunning and superficially charming humbert humbert. notoriously unreliable and utterly morally bankrupt, humbert loves lolita from the first time he ever sets eyes upon her, but the heavy sense of fate that hangs over the novel assures us that this was a meeting that doomed them both.

3. american gods - neil gaiman

shadow’s just got out of prison, his wife’s dead, and his best friend with her, and he’s out of a job, a life, and shit out of luck. when he meets - and keeps meeting - the dangerously mendacious mr wednesday, he is dragged into a war, and not just any war, but a war that takes place on multiple planes of existence, with weapons he can’t even see, and between beings he has no hope of understanding. this is a war between gods, and this much, mr wednesday says, is guaranteed: only one side will be left standing, when the wolf howls its last.

4. retreat from love - colette

claudine, colette’s most famous character, is staying in an isolated french farmhouse. her husband is away, and in his absence she decides to play matchmaker between her friend annie and her husband’s (homosexual) son, marcel. as things around her begin to fall apart, claudine retreats into the natural world, familiar to her from her wild rural childhood, to help her survive.

5. fear & loathing in las vegas - hunter s. thompson

it’s 1971, and the american dream is dead and buried. so they’ve got a car, a trunk full of drugs and tickets to a national drugs prevention conference. this can only end well. “he’s not just some dingbat i picked up on the strip,” insists the narrator, thompson avatar raoul duke, of his friend, dr. gonzo, but he might as well be— and as they gleefully cause utter havoc, it begins to become horribly clear to duke that everything he spent the sixties fighting for was all for nothing, but, hell, there’s probably some ether left.

6. the big sleep - raymond chandler

it’s 1939, and the second most famous detective in all of literature makes his first official outing in this moody, complex, savagely witty novel. philip marlowe says “i was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and i didn’t care who knew it,” but sadly for him, he’s going to need more than the gun under his arm and a couple of hundred bucks if he’s going to keep his head above water, because he’s agreed to take a case that, it turns out, he knows nothing about, and he’s running out of time, out of money, and, most importantly, likelihood of making it through the night.

7. the rules of attraction - bret easton ellis

it’s hard to find a more bleak novel than this much-overlooked gem, which follows three incredibly vapid college students through several semesters at the fictional camden college. there’s sean bateman (brother of that bateman) who is obsessed with making it look like he’s keeping it together, but is really falling apart with shocking rapidity, lauren hynde, the object of sean’s affections, who wanted to lose her virginity, and, well, the scene where she does is one of the most horrible things i have ever read, and paul denton, who has fucked lauren and is fucking sean, and who wants nothing other to be happy. but, like all of ellis’s work, realism creeps in around the absurdity, and these young people were never destined to have happy endings.

8. dracula - bram stoker

daddy’s home. in the greatest, and one of the most experimental, vampire novels ever written, jonathan harker unwisely agrees to help a reclusive romanian count purchase property in london, which sparks a chain of gruesome events that many of the novel’s characters will not survive.  

9. the secret history - donna tartt

what do you get when you have six classicists, a sense of total disconnection from the world, and a lot of extremely nasty secrets? this novel tells you on the very first page: murder most foul. richard papen transfers to the remote hampden college (the twin of ellis’s camden) and falls in with a glamorous, elitist group of young euripides-devotees, who, richard swiftly learns, have made some very, very bad decisions, and, as the novel develops, it swiftly becomes clear that, in fact, none of these characters might be making it out of here alive.

10. franny and zooey - j.d. salinger

franny and zooey glass are the two youngest members of their family, the family salinger reportedly believed to be his greatest literary creation: the rag-tag band of psychologically damaged geniuses called the glass family. franny is at smith (maybe) and is having a breakdown, zooey is in the bathtub and trying to cope, in his own way, with the suicide, some years earlier, of their oldest brother, seymour. this is a novel in which nothing happens but in which everything matters, and there is so much beneath the surface it is breathtaking.

(if pushed: lolita is my favourite novel, colette my favourite novelist.)

gyzym’s “i refuse to live in a world where the first book doesn’t exist, and a lot of other good shit” list:



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