i read the 4 most popular dark academia books (and they broke my heart) | reading vlog

dark Academia it's edgy it's mysterious it's intellectual and it's everywhere the first concept of dark Academia was a 2015 Tumblr Trend that made learning and reading and being just a goth elitist nerd into something that was hip and fun and communal but since then it's evolved Beyond fashion into media and more importantly into what can only be described as a lifestyle there are so many books that fall under the umbrella of dark Academia one of them was even the most important influence behind the original 2015 subculture but despite the fact that I own seven subtly different shades of juel tones pants the truth is I'm kind of a fake fan I've read basically none of these books but it's fall and the leaves are changing and for the first time in my life I'm never returning to school ever again and it's the perfect time to read the four biggest dark Academia books to finally understand the basics of this thing that's got everybody so Twisted the books I'm going to be reading today are the secret history a deadly education if we were villains and babble there are others I could have picked for this video but like are there really you know I feel like these three are the Heavy Hitters they're the ones that I always see people talking about online they're all kind of the same Vibe but in like three starkly different fonts from what I've been told so these are really the best way to like educ at myself in the fundamentals and then this one's fantasy so it'll hopefully provide me with the necessary variety to prevent me from wanting to throw myself out of a window by the time that I'm finished recording this video I don't actually think that'll happen I think that based on everything that I know about myself and my personality I'm going to have a wonderful time reading these books I think I'm probably going to really like them but never hurts to have a little bit of spice in your back pocket I'm obviously going to be starting with the secret history by Donna tart there's just no other way to begin I mean this book functionally birthed the entire genre I feel like it would be criminal for me to not pay my respects at the very beginning of this Odyssey other dark Academia book in existence has been compared to this one in blurs so I just want to understand okay I want to start off strong the font size in this book is just like startlingly small and it's also 600 Pages nobody knows how long reading this will take me but my delusion is that I can finish one of these books every 2 days if I'm brave enough so Off to the Races also not sure if you've noticed but I am dressed in like my very best dark Academia fits today I'm going to be trying to keep the stle very Posh very mysterious very every blood moon I helped my professor in his Coty of Greek and LA students sacrifice a business major in the empty field behind the quad just all video that's the goal I no promises I might run out of ideas this might take a lot of days to do and if you don't like one of my fits keep it to yourself okay my mental health is a very fragile thing and also it would be a self-report that you know nothing about Style Beauty and Grace so on that note let's make some tea let's light a candle let's I don't know what I'm going to do it's already getting dark outside I planned on reading 300 pages of this book today let's try let's try my best [Music] [Music] hello good morning it's a different day I'm in a new fit you can kind of like see my skirt down here it's cute I promise and I'm on track I was able to get through the first half of this book yesterday it's like divided very cleanly into two parts so this was very motivating to get to this blank page but to do that I had to stay up really late and by the time I was done like I was not in any state to record my initial feelings that would have been a Herculean task and I'm not Hercules okay I'm just a 23 year-old teenage girl I don't know what you expect from me but after like the first 30 pages or so which took me a little bit of time to get into I've actually been really enjoying this book so far it's very mysterious it's very edgy I like those things in literature there is one thing I don't think that enough people are talking about when they talk about this book and that's that in its first 270 Pages there are only five chapters which is insane there's a chapter that's over a 100 pages and if you're a short chapters girl like I am you know it's kind of a challenge sometimes to have very few like mini dopamine checkpoints to help fuel you up and keep you reading the book The basic premise of this book if you're like me and you avoided it until now is that it follows this guy named Richard who ends up getting into this very like prestigious liberal arts college on financial aid and he ends up joining kind of Against All Odds this extremely selective five- member group of students who are studying Greek underneath this incredibly mysterious ious eccentric reclusive Professor kind of like a goth Miss Frizzle if she was really into Greek and Latin and this group of students takes like all of their classes with this professor and they're very isolated from the rest of the University but of course they're also having that very one-of-a-kind transformative College liberal arts experience that I think a lot of us tend to romanticize I know I did when I was in high school and the actual plot of this book follows the different obsessions that all of the students in this group have with classic languages luxury wealth their own intelligence just a ton of different things that when they come together all have this kind of opulent maob quality to them Richard as the new guy as The Outsider he's like fascinated with this this man is a very normal person he's there on financial aid he's not obnoxiously wealthy like the rest of the students in his group things about him by the way that nobody ever seems to notice Richard is worried constantly that he's going to be figured out but it's like none of these people actually conceive him being poor as a realistic possibility for somebody that they've chosen to associate with as a peer but whatever the point is that Richard really just wants to be like this group of students in both an intellectual and an aesthetic sense he's very much the self-insert here of a normal person's first interaction with the world of like the gig go wealthy and intellectual and we learned from literally page one like in the prologue that this entire situation has somehow some way led to the murder of one member of this group by the rest of them and really in this book we're just following the evolution of everything from when Richard first started in these classes to eventually where wherever we end up after that I'm not sure obviously I haven't finished this book yet I knew essentially nothing about this book going in my brain was about as smooth as you could possibly imagine and I have to say I find it pretty surprising that this is the book that ended up inspiring the whole dark Academia subculture when it feels so obviously like a critique of all of its characters and I mean every body you know like obviously all of those Rich intellectual students but then also Richard for wanting so desperately to be like them that he ends up kind of sacrificing his own Humanity during the events of this story I feel like this book just hits you over the head constantly with this is bad this is obviously ridiculous this is abundantly clear how awful this is and I feel like this almost gives dark Academia just as a concept this interesting inherence taboo like here we are building up and romanticizing this aesthetic against the direct warning of the actual book and that's just a really interesting contradiction between what the book is actually trying to say and what it really accomplished in the real world by starting the trend I don't know maybe I'll have more complex feelings on that as I kind of continue to read it's just a point of interest it's just a point of discussion it's just a point of what's going on how did the world end up this way I'm not sure yet I haven't even finished this book much less started any of the others that have been inspired by it so I'll find out soon on an actual enjoyment level I have liked this book a lot so far I feel like it took me a little bit to initially get into and there are definitely still portions that are like hardcore into philosophy or classicism where I'm literally just not smart enough to get the reference I feel like I'm even more excluded from those conversations than Richard is but I also feel like that's kind of the point like the book almost becomes a little bit weaker if those characters aren't esoteric even to the reader maybe it's weird to say but I feel like a big part of understanding them and their purposes in the story is also understanding that you're not meant to understand everything that they're saying I've also really liked getting to know all of the students again from the jump you know that they kill someone they kill one of their friends and I'm impressed by how likable I'm finding them throughout the story despite that the book has just done the concept of morly gray very very well in my opinion because when you're immersed you're like so true these are all reasonable things you're doing these are reasonable reasons to want to kill someone but then you think about it for one second and you're like okay did I just endorse murder on Maine let's walk that back you know which is a sign that the book is very effective I think in what it's trying to do and of course aesthetically donard has nailed description like I can't lie I also would want to be here I also would want to be seeing these things and being in these beautiful rooms and looking at all of these like Fresco on the walls it makes me want to pretend to want to read philosophy in the original Greek you know which is something that I absolutely do not want to do I know myself well enough to know that that would be miserable for me and yet you know I'm reading this book and I'm like should I do another degree and yeah I mean I'm really excited to see where this goes I feel like there's a lot of book left in comparison to what I reasonably expect to happen so I'm sure the story kind of veers into a weird Direction maybe I don't know I don't know what I'm talking about I obviously haven't read it yet so I'm going to go do that okay I'm going to go read the rest of this book and hopefully I'll check in with you after either today in the same fit or tomorrow more likely tomorrow because I still have another like 300 of these tiny little twoo font pages and after my medication wears off I I don't like talking to a camera anymore it's just it's not for me it's not it's not for my people so see you [Music] then this is how long the next chapter is can you believe that what's even the point why even have chapters if you're going to go this [Music] far I got some watermelon which I can appreciate is not a very on brand snack for this video but you know what it's really good I am who I am I have a little bit under 200 pages left I'm in kind of a weird point in the story right now where like this first 100 pages of this section have just on a objective level had a lot of things going on there have been a lot of conversations there have been a lot of events a lot of irons are in the fire if you will and yet somehow I feel like it's slower by like a lot than the first half of this book when objectively there was just less I think that was happening in the story but the mystery was so compelling of like what happened and how they're going to end up in this situation and what was going on in the group to begin with that Richard was not privy to not that I know the answers to those questions even though I definitely get the impression that we're going to have some reveals that are like things were not as you thought they were different they were even more up you know I'm sure that we're going to get some of that in this book I'm getting the impression that that's where we're going here but that's not happening yet and there's just less tension to latch on to I think in this part than there was in the first part so obviously have a lot of book left before I'm done with this but at least so far I definitely think that this first part is is stronger than the second part but we're going to see okay carrying on [Music] so I'm done I finished this it's over I feel like I need to sleep on this before I talk about it with you I have a lot of opinions I have a lot of thoughts but they're all kind of conflicting with each other right now and I I just need to take some time to figure it out right now probably a three star for me which I'm surprised by it especially with how much I like the first half of the book I really thought that I would love this but I only like it which just feels like an incomplete thing to say given how many conflicting opinions I have right now there are Parts I really did not think were necessary at all and then there there are moments where I'm like oh this was wonderful but was it worth the 200 pages that it took to get there who knows I don't know I need to think about it I can see the headline here young Midwestern girl is shocked when 600 page literary fiction book read in a 24-hour period absolutely fries her brain unknown what you will do moving forward it's my fault that I'm like this right now for the record I don't think that this is the intended way to consume this book I might like it more if I'm given more time to think about it so that's why I'm not going to talk about it right now yep nothing further I'll see you tomorrow okay hello again new day new pants and I've slept on it I thought about it I've gone back through like the few annotations that I made in the book and I do think I'm going to give this book a three star rating and here's why a lot of what I talked about as really enjoying yesterday when I was doing my recap after the first half of the book with the suspense and the World building and the characters still really being being likable for example despite the fact that they were really bad people just it being a really compelling portrait of morally greyness if you will for the most part in the back half of the book like all of that just stopped being true which really took me off guard I think especially reading this as quickly as I did which again I can appreciate probably isn't the optimal way to go through a book like this that has this much going on under the surface because when that initial like Freeze Frame record scratch I bet you're wondering how we ended up here in this field killing our friends kind of moment from the prologue is resolved and you understand the answers to most of the questions with that situation that mystery is replaced in the back half of this book with this just very Meandering examination of all of the emotional consequences that the characters are now facing this is not an exaggeration there's basically a 200 Page section that is just the characters like drinking a lot and smoking their little cigarettes and being all tortured and like how did this happen to little old me and they're starting all of these like made for TV lifetime soap opera side plots with each other which are really all you have to hold on to during this 200 Page stretch but then they all go on to mean kind of nothing like very few of those s plots at least on a first read which obviously is all I have done seem to go anywhere at all by the end of the story they're never really resolved in a satisfying kind of way which I feel like that's kind of the point but as a reader that's just the kind of thing that I find to be very underwhelming and that's honestly a shame because the way that this book wraps up like maybe the last 60 Pages or so it's actually really good it's effective it's genuinely a shocking moment I think for the reader that calls back in this striking way to something that happens earlier in the book you know like with the pig and then the hotel no spoilers if you know you know and at that point that kind of disarmed me because I was so used to feeling low-level disappointment with the second half of this book that I was like wow this is really good again like I can see why people love this we're back we made it but just so little of that again like 200 Page middle section contributes to the efficacy of that ending honestly if I'm being serious with you it made it worse I think for me than it would have been because with essentially no plot going on in this section like things are happening but none of them matter the characters to me just started feeling so Hollow and I stopped caring about any of them even Henry who to me was the most compelling character from the first half of the book like this man speaks seven languages but then dropped out of high school for the aesthetic just icon Behavior if I've ever seen it Henry has by far the most compelling relationships with the rest of the cast and even he becomes boring and kind of annoying which just made me wonder over and over again as I was reading this like what's this all for because I want to make clear that I can appreciate this jux toos between the parts as very literally the main point of this book the characters are flat and Hollow the more that you read because the book is to me obviously saying that underneath this apparent luster of dark Academia beneath that extravagant kind of aesthetic it's completely shallow there nothing there once you peel back that first layer that's what this book is critiquing and that's what's literally happening with the structure of the story you have this first part which is this first layer which is intriguing and interesting and then you compare it to the second part which is I think on purpose supposed to be boring and annoying like Richard the perspective character feels the same way as me in the story he's annoyed he's kind of disgusted with his situation he's realizing that the people he's around are kind of just vapid and the worst and we as the readers are Richard we are also this person who's interacting with this world for the first time and discovering its like dark underbelly so it's like this book is in the second half is just on this war path to hit us over the head over and over again with that feeling and I can appreciate when an author can show not tell a theme like that but it's not my thing I don't want to read 200 pages of empty conversation to prove to me that these characters have actually just all been vapid bad people all along and the likability that I thought they might have does not in fact exist and was just a byproduct of their Immaculate aesthetic honestly it's a style of writing that I find to be a little bit pretentious which kind of adds this weird additional layer of irony to this book and to its theming so yeah I mean again a lot of this was really good with the massive caveat of that middle section if you pair that down I think that the plot of this book for the most part was was really tight and well constructed when it mattered I probably give the first half of this book a solid four and I'd probably give the back half a two if I'm being nice so we're just going to smoosh those together and say it's a three and then call it a day and move on with our lives I will say this does make me excited to read these like deconstructions of the secret history I think that there's a lot that can be done I mean there are things I didn't talk about too with weird things that this book does with this like random imaginary Middle Eastern country that I think I don't know I feel like there are things that could be said by people much smarter than me about the way that the book handled things like that there's a lot there I think one pack so especially Babel I'm excited for but I know that this book also is kind of maybe a response to the secret history really nobody knows I know even less about this book than I know about Babel but just to break it up and let her simmer a little bit before I start reading things that are more directly inspired by it I think I got to break out the fantasy novel I think we have to read a deadly education so that's what we're doing next this is much more pulpy dark Academia fantasy I imagine there's a lot less social commentary here I can't tell you how different the of these books are let me find like a representative example I think that the secret history might have like twice as many words per page so this is the brain break of the episode it's coming early I don't know what I'm going to do if I need another one but so yeah that's what we're doing next okay so as you can see the Sun is setting currently outside I don't know where the day went I got completely sidetracked on a different project but it's okay we're going to start this book now no promises I don't know how much of this I'm going to get through but we're going to see we're going to try yep mhm that's what we're going to do we're going to stay strong easy chill fantasy moment that's what we're going to have right now [Music] yes okay I wasn't going to film today I read very very little last night I only like 20 pages but I'm catching up a little bit I'm about 100 pages in this is cute I didn't know that there was such a fun romance subplot in this book do you think everyone's always trying to sit with you for your amazing personality or something she says to this man I guess you're just immune he said bloody well right I am I said but he was grinning at me a little from under his overgrown hair tentatively and apparently I was lying hello why is that so cute why am I such a fan so I went a little crazy I went a little stupid I went a little literate and I read this entire book it's done I just downloaded it like directly into my brain in one sitting and because I filmed essentially nothing I just like sat in one place and read until it was over I still hav told you what it's about so let's fix that this book follows a girl named Al who is a student at this magical Academy that's called the scol man which is basically your typical magical school with the extreme caveat that at all times everything evil inside of the school as well as arguably the school itself is trying to just viciously hunt down and kill all of the students there which reasonably might make a girl Wonder like why does anybody want to go there why does anybody want to be in this evil place and that's actually explains because apparently outside is even worse for young Wizards before they've learned enough things to protect themselves they're just like little flares for all of the evil in the world it honestly reminds me of how the demigods in the Percy Jackson world are hunted down by all of the evil mythological creatures so they end up going to Camp Half Blood which arguably is also a very dangerous place but this this book is adult fantasy and not middle grad so a lot more people are dying in some very creative ways throughout the events of what's going on here and the main character in this book Al is above all things just a massive to everyone which honestly I love that for her because she has a really good reason all of the witches and wizards in this world have magical affinities and El's Affinity through no fault of her own is weapons of mass destruction she's actively been predestined to destroy the world but she really doesn't want to do that she's committed to trying to do as much good as she can with what she's been given she just really doesn't want to be evil but none of the people at this Academy know that they just all catch this magical vibe that she's going to be a mass murderer one day it's pretty rancid as you can imagine and then they either outright avoid her or treat her like garbage which explains really well why she's so jaded and mean to everybody she kind of like has to have a sharp tongue in order to preserve any amounts of personal dignity but this guy Orion is one of the only people that she's ever met who doesn't treat her that way automatically he's kind of this oblivious hmbo superhero type guy and he's made a name for himself as this combat Prodigy who just goes around and saves people's lives constantly all of the time which has really thrown off the balance of things apparently because for the school to work a certain amount of students are expected to die in order to keep things functional and that's just not happening because Orion is such a stud so things are starting to get kind of weird and because reasons Orion and L ends up forming this tenuous friendship that is just RI with banter there is Banter out the wazo in this book it's a very good time if you like that and the two of them work together to fix things as the school starts to heat up so that's the brief that's what's going on here and truly this book at least in tone could not have been more different than the secret history I mean we have the academy we have the like literal dark underbelly of the school that's a thing that actively exists in this book as a location rather than just as a metaphor and we do get some class commentary as well because the kids at the Academy either come from what's called an enclave which is basically a group of wizards that have bonded together on the outside and and therefore share their power with each other which is very difficult to gather on your own these people have more technology they have an automatic community of allies when they get into the school just things like that and they're contrasted in this book with kids who are not from an enclave who don't really have anything to fall back on like Al and these independent kids are typically left to fend entirely for themselves and they're really only recruited to the academy as fod so that way The Enclave kids have a higher rate of survival and that class commentary in particular gets a pretty thorough examination in this book honestly arguably a more thorough examination than in the secret history which is something that I found interesting interesting but outside of that this book is really its own thing like it takes itself a lot less seriously I think than the secret history does I might have made the sound very like dramatic and intense in my description and in terms of events that's kind of true but mostly this book is this almost surreal dark comedy because it's presented from the perspective of L who is a very like Ry and sarcastic narrator and she presents the situations in this book with so much irreverence that you almost can't help but find this to be a lot more Charming I think than scary or intense and yeah I mean I like this book overall I thought it was way cuter than it had any right to be it is the slowest of slowburn and I was living for it you know like that's the song of my people I would probably give this four stars I mean obviously I consumed it in a very short amount of time I just found the world to be fascinating which is also my major caveat I think that the main reason why a person wouldn't like this book is because dude the info dumping is like insane it's only 300 pages long and probably like 20000 of them maybe more that's not an exaggeration are paragraphs about how the world works and how the school works that are just Loosely baked in kind of to whatever's happening but not normally in a super convincing way and I actually liked that I I have a really soft spot for a good magical Academy and I found the world around it to be very compelling so I didn't mind that most of this book felt like just learning and reading Wikipedia articles on this universe and this school and the way that these people are casting spells and building communities and getting through this place alive like all of that I found to be fascinating but if you like your world building a little bit more baked in a little bit more subtle I think this is probably the least subtle book that I've read maybe ever but definitely all year and the Cliffhanger by the way is Criminal if you know you know I have half a mind to march to Barnes & Noble right now and get the next book in the series because apparently it's a series but I have things to do I have things to accomplish so it's going to have to wait on that note back to contemporary Society with our next pick we're going to be reading if we were villains which is the secret history but make it Shakespeare from what I've been told let it be known I know very little about Shakespeare I love 10 Things I Hate About You that's Shakespeare kind of I think that I've read and watched more Shakespeare retellings than actual works by the man himself actually on that no it's fun fact nobody asked but my favorite conspiracy theory of all time easily is the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare was actually a woman just one of the girls if you will just like imagine what a dunk that is on every historian ever there is a fire Atlantic feature on this very topic that convinced me I've used it to convince many people in my life when they make the mistake of giving me a platform to speak to them for longer than a few minutes like we know so much about this man's life and honestly none of it actually makes any sense at all you should look into it after you're done with this video I I know more about that than I know about anything that Shakespeare's ever written so that should go to show how prepared I am to read this book which is actually not very but I'm still excited I have an appreciation for Shakespeare so I think that this will be a good time cloudy day which feels like a good vibe to read this book [Music] fck okay check in what's this about so these seven people are all seniors at this Shakespeare Theater Academy apparently it's So Posh that they don't even do degrees there they just do this certificate that gets you in wherever you want to go in the world of theater if you graduate it's one of those kinds of things and everybody who's made it to the senior year because people are cut every year if they end up sucking too much for the Academy to like deem them worthy of graduating the seven people who have made it to senior year are all insufferable Shakespeare nerds and we know from the first page that one of them our perspective character Oliver has been incarcerated for 10 years for some kind of crime I have to imagine it's murder we don't really know yet what's going on but the actual events of this book are apparently a story that he's telling about what happened to the detective that originally put him in prison and the detective has known for the entire 10 years that Oliver has been incarcerated that it was not actually Oliver who committed the crime or at least not in the way that the courts thought when they convicted him I like that we have fewer details about what happened than we did with the secret history because with that book from page one you know that Bunny's getting merked and it makes the detective work like marginally I think less interesting to know who dies because with this book I'm 80 pages in and I still don't know what the crime even was I don't know who's responsible I don't know if it was all of them I don't know if it was their teacher who did it and they all had to cover for him and as a result the suspense is really good because I'm just sitting here like ooh you're the criminal ooh this is the motive ooh this is why you're so mad ooh this person is completely unstable and possibly will complete a blood sacrifice during Julius Caesar and I like that it really keeps you guessing I will say though that a con of this book so far is that probably one in every three things that these characters are saying to each other is a Shakespeare quote these people will be having a conversation and then one of them will just go how many fond fools serve mad jealousy I would give all Fame for a pot of Ale the charest maid is prodical enough if she unmasked her beauty to the moon like shut up I hate people like this in real life and I don't know where any of these quotes are coming from I don't know what's going on I don't know why they're like this and I think that if you went into this book as a Shakespeare fan or as somebody who has just read a lot of his works that would probably be a feature not a book because I imagine that there's a lot of subtlety and Nuance that goes into picking all of those quotes and they're probably relevant to what's going on in interesting ways I just don't know any of them I haven't read anything by Shakespeare since maybe my sophomore year of high school and even with that the odd that I would actually recognize a direct quote from a play that I have actually read that has at one point existed in my brain zero there's no chance so those parts of the book have just made me feel kind of dumb and sad like I'm not enlightened enough to partake in it and it almost feels like there's something dark Academia to that it almost feels like there's something thematic to that me the laywoman not being able to understand the esoteric references of the elite in this book like I kind of feel like I'm serving a part of the theme here to you but I actually don't think that that's the intent of the reader of this book I think the perfect reader of this book probably has a working knowledge of Shakespeare but here's the thing I was not a theater Kid myself but I was friends with a lot of them growing up just through speech and debate there's a lot of overlap there and I just have a soft spot for the art I have a soft spot for the theater nerd I have a soft spot for all of the random politics that go into casting plays in handling all of that nonsense and the rivalries that form that stuff is pretty interesting to me and outside of the spoken Shakespeare references that all of these characters they're using I'm actually finding the pettiness and the drama and the nonsense to be really fun so far so I can look past feeling like the dumbest girl in the world reading all of these quotes I don't completely understand some of which use words that I definitely should know but don't but that's okay you know what I'll feel a little stupid any day of the week if the story is really good and I think that this has a lot of potential to be pretty interesting okay back to it it's currently 7:18 so I don't know how much more I'm going to get through tonight but we'll find out talk to you soon I wasn't going to film today but I decided to read a little bit and things are picking up I'm just left here thinking they going to get out of this one one bed in my literary Thriller okay so it's now Thursday and I finished this book it is done she has slain the demon I think that I would probably put it somewhere in the 3.5 star range maybe four if I'm feeling really nice I can acknowledge for sure why this book is so popular I think that the plot is beat for beat like really similar to the plot of the secret history but the things that are different between these books make this one a lot more like fast-paced intense kind of throughout the story it doesn't have the same like Soul crushing back half drag as a secret history does because there's still a lot of unresolved questions even after the events of the mystery that you're not getting answers to until the very end of the book and it's almost like you're investigating it alongside the characters which I really liked and the relationship Dynamics between the characters in this book are so messy it's really heavy on like a b gay due crime atmosphere I don't know how else to describe it when I was reading this sometimes I just felt like one of those moms at a grocery store who's reading a copy of People magazine in the aisle and looking at the other middle-aged woman behind her and just going did you see he did this she's sleeping with who it just activated within me this feminine urge to gossip about these characters and their lives and this absolute dumpster fire mess that they've gotten themselves into in this book also let me just say the ending of this book what was that I don't even know what to say about it I was out here like Googling to make sure that I understood everything correctly and to read fan theories and to just scream about it into the void with all the other people online I just couldn't help myself that part was really good it like raised my overall enjoyment of this book by at least 35% but overall moving on to the negatives I just don't think that I was quite the exact right kind of nerd to really enjoy this book I respect Shakespeare I respect his or her work of course but I draw the line at the sheer number of Shakespeare quotes in this book if I knew any of the source material if I cared if I'd read any of these plays even one time I'm sure that there would be a lot to unpack I'm sure that the quotes are selected very intentionally to convey subliminal messages about what's going on but truly I just found it annoying as somebody who's deeply uncultured and it never gets better arguably it gets even worse because things become more abstract and viby and implied as the story goes on and the Mystery continues to develop and when to truly enjoy what's going on and to understand what's happening in this book I'm expected to understand the underlying message behind one of these characters making a Shakespeare reference that barely reads as English to me because I'm so deeply uncultured it just doesn't hit and frequently I found the book to be kind of hard to get through as a result with that a lot of this book is them acting in Shakespeare plays and doing scenes together that are written out word for word in the book as they act them and again I'm sure it matters I'm sure that the scenes that are chosen are very important and as a Layman I feel like I got maybe 15% of The Vibes of why at all times which I have to say was enough to understand what was going on and to enjoy the plot of the story at a base level but I never felt like I had a complete understanding of any of those scenes because I'm so unfamiliar with the source material which is unfortunate because it made me feel like I was missing out on part of the story in terms of dark Academia Vibes and what I'm learning so far in this journey let's do a check-in we're going to do a check-in for me the main difference between these two books is this story is a lot more personal and vulnerable than the secret history is if we were villains it's a lot more focused on the relationships between the characters with the academic Shakespeare part serving a more secondary role though still definitely contributing to how complicated the events in the story are and also to why a lot of the characters do what they do the relationships between the characters or where the reader spends the most time here and in the secret history that's kind of the opposite the relationships between the characters are important in this book only in so far as they represent the greater overarching theme of obsession with these characters intellects and their fields of study and everything to do with the classic quintessential dark Academia Vibe and the problems in this book as a result are complicated of course by the relationships between the characters but almost universally they all Sprout up as a result of the character's obsessions so between the two of them this is definitely the easier book to read obviously it's still a complicated story it still has all of that Shakespeare nonsense that I talked about earlier but thematically it centers around easy to understand themes of like yearning and vulnerability and character drama whereas this book is almost all thematic meat and the characters in this book only really exist to be Ground Up by The Narrative not really to have meaningful relationships with each other overall I think liked this one more the reading experience was definitely better for me since it wasn't nearly as slow in the back half as this was but out of the two I think that the secret history is the book that I'm going to be thinking about more often I think that it tells a more compelling and complete thematic story but on that note let's move on to the last book for this video which is what I'm also pretty sure will be my favorite book based on what I know about it and that is Babble by RF Quang an act of translation is always an act of betrayal bar did you hear her I'm so excited for this book this book is by RF kuang Rebecca the literal queen of my heart I would die for her I read all four of the other books that she has out right now and I loved all of them I thought that they were all Immaculate I think that she's one of the sharpest and most interesting writers who's writing right now at least that I know of I don't know anything I don't claim to be an expert so don't listen to me but that's just my opinion her books are just so good and I've had so many people tell me over and over again that this is the best one that she's released so far no one knows for sure why I put it off until now I couldn't even tell you but it's finally time if at this point it doesn't like change my entire life to be honest with you I'll be kind of annoyed I'm really excited for this let's do it [Music] okay quickest ever check-in because I'm about to go to lunch with my mom but I feel compelled to talk to you about this book because I have no time I've compiled zero notes so this synopsis might be all over the place but this is about a boy named Robin who grows up in a part of China That's effectively raised by this strain of chera that just overtakes all of his friends and family basically his entire street is dead at the beginning of the book and he's literally next to the corpse of his dead mom at like 10 years old just waiting to die so that's not a great way to start your life but suddenly out of nowhere a very like sharply dressed white guy Richard level just sweeps into this house on this again Street that's completely dead and he puts this like mysterious silver bar onto Robin's chest and heals him with it and for reason completely unclear to Robin Professor level sweeps him up and takes him to his Estate in England where he works as a professor of like languages and translation and Linguistics and a bunch of things like that that are all related to East Asian languages and when robin goes to England Professor level and a couple of other tutors that he has as his just buds they train Robin in Greek and Latin as well as a firmer understanding of English which he was already fluent in because he would just mysteriously received books in English when he was young when he was growing up he had a mysterious tutor nobody knew who paid her it was the professor probably but he's training to get better at English and also Greek and Latin so that when he turns 18 he will be accepted into the Oxford University's Language Institute and he does he goes to Oxford and he uncovers a bunch of mysteries I'm sure that's where this book is going but all of it crucially centers around this really interesting magic system that involves silver bars and combinations of languages in Translation with each other and the way it works is when you translate a concept or a word from one language to another language it means simultaneously more and less than the sum of both words combined I don't know if that's making sense a good example for this early in the book is that the word Secret in English and a word for secret in German the German word has these additional layers of meaning that are not captured solely by the English translation that word might also carry a connotation of safety or separation from your enemies or a place of home where you feel like you can really be safe and when you have a silver bar that has both of these words engraved on them and you say them one after the other the thing that's Lost in Translation becomes real around you as a result of the magic so when the word in English and the word in German for secret are both said together literally what happens is for as long of a time as you're touching that metal bar you transport into a space that is inherently safe it's secret yes in so far as it's hidden away it's the part of the word that's lost in that direct translation being made real by Magic in the space around the practitioner which is so dope if I was the wrong kind of nerd for if we were villains I am exactly the ideal kind of nerd for this book with how interesting I find language is and it's just so good and I love it so far and I like all the characters and there are a lot of small things about the book that I find to be super interesting already I can totally see at least part of where this is going in terms of colonization and kind of being a response to the elitism of Academia like in order for these word combinations for the silver bars to be found you need people who have incredible native understandings of language so a lot of the students at this institute are people like Robin who are from places that are not like white Europe that are only taken in in so far as the contribution that they can make as native speakers of these languages to further like white imperialist society and so much of Robin's existence still has to be making himself palatable to these white people around him like at least right now you don't even know his given name in this book because he changes it in the first chapter to be something that Europeans can pronounce his history is literally erased in order for him to start this new life but he still carries around his ethnicity like a brand in Oxford where everybody can tell that he doesn't belong nobody's treating him well they're still like incredibly racist even though he's given up his name and his culture in order to try and fit in with them and also even though he's so much more vital to the continuation of this magical Empire with what he can contribute than these people who are like majoring in classics and just go into the pub every day like they don't matter but Robin does and yet Robin and the other kids in this institute are still treated very much like second class citizens it's just also interesting to me I feel like you know the rest of this Vlog has been me reading books that I recognized as good but the process of actually reading them was not particularly absorbing and this one it's just like I'm like a sponge bro I just love it I love Rebecca's writing style she has this way of taking you on Journeys where you're so close to the characters emotionally that you like feel the things that they're feeling like I'm feeling the awe that Robin is exper experiencing as he's looking up at the Tower of Babel for the first time I'm feeling the joy that he has when he's meeting this person who was raised in a very similar way to him his like first ever kindred spirit in his entire life and I feel this growing sense of tension of what is going on here of surely something nefarious is at play and it's just really compelling me to want to read like this entire book in one sitting which I don't even know if that's possible like I have maybe 400 pages left but truly I might try who's to say today might be an Olympiad of sorts I could keep talking about this forever but I have to leave it's just really interesting and I really like it and I am so excited to keep reading okay okay I'm leaving bye okay so it is currently 700 p.m. and I have read zero pages I don't even know why I'm Vlogging this nobody knows for sure but this is just me saying it might seem like I read a lot it might seem like I'm super productive but this is literally what I do with all of my time constantly and I still sometimes have days where my mental health is so bad that I just have to like sit there place aoku on my phone and and rot and literally like Fade Away into my bed until I don't exist anymore and I'm just a shell instead of a person and I would consider this to be a good ERA of my mental health I didn't want to waste this fit because like God you guys can't even really see look at the drip like I don't think I have very many of these left in me I feel like I'm running out but this one was really good so yeah it's just a thing that we're working on I'm really just trying to remind myself that I have value Beyond like the books I'm able to read and what I'm able to produce and having a difficult day does not mean that I'm like a bad person and let's connect that back to the theme because I think a lot of why I feel this way St from obviously partially my literal anxiety disorder but also partially from all of the ways that I felt tested academically growing up and that I started to derive a lot of my validation as a person from the grades that I was able to produce in my classes and the ways that I was able to impress the teachers that I had throughout my life all of that is contributing to this need to perform even when it's a hobby and something that I am doing kind of just for the sake of doing it I still feel this need to Output enough stuff to read enough books to mark off enough boxes on my little notion where I track everything that I read I literally have to find other ways to feel Joy and to feel filled and like have pride in myself and my abilities that are not just turning in an essay that I finished the night before at maybe 10% of my true power and having a teacher be like this is wonderful can I use it as an example I lived off of that feeling for so much of my life and right now I'm just kind of trying to figure out how to not let that feeling become my inner World in my view of myself just because I felt like it was the view of the school system and my parents and a lot of the adults around me determining my worth based on me being a good student and not so much me being a good person or like especially not in terms of me being happy and like visibly doing well and that's a difficult pill to swallow because I still live in that Society I still have to do things correctly I can't feed myself based on Vibes and self- Lov you know and I'm always going to be a part of that narrative but at the very least I'm really trying to let that stay external to me let that stay something I have to live within and not an internal way that I see myself in my presence in the world I just feel like we owe it to ourselves to be kinder to us than the world around us is so yeah I don't really know how dark Academia that is but I feel like it all comes from like the world of giftedness and society and school and just structuring your entire life around ultimately producing things to make Society run and and having none of it ultimately matter in the end I don't know there it's there's something secret history about that there's something donard there at least based on these books I feel like there's a pretty high correlation between reading and murdering someone ultimately down the road because you end up fued by obsession with some kind of task so actually maybe I'm just protecting myself maybe this is me learning from the books that I've read today cope cope cope see cope but yeah I just wanted to check in because I feel like there is a lot of people being productive on book and people reading a gajillion books every single month and people doing all of the things and getting through their physical TBR and just like accomplishing a bunch of really impressive tasks and it can be really inspiring to watch those videos but I just really feel like it's important that in my content I'm trying to show the whole picture like yes I'm somebody who is able to read a lot of books I'm blessed with a lot of spare time that I can dedicate to this but I'm also somebody with a fun little cocktail of mental disorders that means that I can even always do the things that I really really love and the things that I really really look forward to that's not always something that I have the energy or the space to achieve even me like in my daily life you know so you're not weird if you relate to that and you're not bad and you're not lazy just because you had a bad day no matter what you think that you learned when you were growing up in school or what adults might have told you about what your intelligence should allow you to have the capabilities to do like it doesn't say anything about your character if you weren't able to do all of the things you wanted to do today nobody can nobody can do that people just lie but also some people have less going on up here and and they they're just better at it than us and that's okay too and I would love it if in a year I'd be able to tell you how enlightened I am how how so balanced and mentally stable I've become but really I think more so what you're going to get from me is like ways I cope so my camera died because I needed even more fun today but that's everything I wanted to say just look at the fit like ooh ooh look at the color combo look at the brown socks that once had cute shoes on them but don't anymore transition to whenever I get back to reading this hopefully tomorrow one can dream hi it's the next day I'm going to read this book again I'm going into this reading experience already feeling vaguely emotionally compromised we've already cried a couple of times today you know who's not getting invited to my wedding Walgreens they didn't have my prescription I don't know what I meant to do about that or with that I'm just in a fragile mood and I'm not stupid nor am I a liar like I do have some awareness that the last part of this book is supposed to be quite sad I've seen people crying about it I don't know what happens but I know that it like tears people apart I'm just banking on the fact that I'm not going to get far enough into this book for it to kick me while I'm down like I just want to fade away out of this Mortal plane into a fantasy world that I find interesting that I find compelling that can help me forget for a second that I have a body and a brain and thoughts and responsibilities that I currently don't want to deal with that's why I've suddenly remembered tter I guess just in this moment of desperation like I don't know like the the pendulum swings to the other side and now all I can do actually is read a book so this is the realistic depiction of how I still get through so many books per month despite frequently being how I was last night as well I'm the most All or Nothing person I've ever met in my life only the hottest girls and not girls will understand that through their lived experiences if that's you congrats and I'm sorry let's read that's what we do here on this channel we're going to read this book uh I literally like this book I like this book what is going on my brain is so broken dude now my life is [Music] like something world I'm living [Music] in this book is making me feel exceptionally monolingual I've never felt more monolingual than I do reading this book I feel so useless to society oh it's so good it's so interesting do Rebecca she's just so cool and smart and I want her to adopt me I've heard people describe this book as boring before like maybe if you're not like a super mega Giga Nerd Like Me Maybe then you would find this but boring but I'm just so intrigued turns out and I know this is really crazy but stay with me if you can manage the motivation to do the hobby that you love that you know you enjoy doing and that makes you feel better about things shock you might feel better about [Music] things [Music] everything is falling apart okay hi hello I got through an absurd amount of this book last night if you can tell I've kind of given up on wearing a cute fit for today it's probably My Last Day filming this video and I just decided when I woke up this morning that it would probably be best for me emotionally if I wore comfortable clothes the ending of this book like where I think it's all going is just so threatening to me and I just wanted to get ahead of it I wanted to make myself nice and cozy in case I can never do anything ever again yeah I love this so far I'm trying to think of a way to cogently describe like why this book is hitting so much with me right now because things are really kicking into gear right now but a lot of the book was pretty slow I just didn't care like you found this book boring great how was having friends in high school how was playing in sports teams how was having socially acceptable Hobbies I would not know any of of those things because even the slow parts of this book are exactly the kind of thing that I have found fascinating like my entire life for me one of the only cons that I found so far within the story and honestly it's not even really a con like I don't think it's impacting my enjoyment but I could see how other people could care so I'm going to talk about it is that the characters in this book are extremely variable in terms of like depth and their purpose in the story let me just tell you I'm losing my mind as I continue to read this book because of how emotional that the story is making me at this point I have just I didn't update you on where I was but I'm on like the last of five sections of this book and I'm losing my mind because guess what I care about the characters I think that their relationships are really important and tender and oh it's just it's been so much watching everything fall apart for them but at the same time this is clearly a book that is above all else trying to make a really important and scathing statement on the ways that Western empires have extracted resources from abused like literally poisoned other countries in the name of maintaining their hegemonic power that is obviously like the capital P point of this book you know it from the first page as you're diving in and she's giving us that commentary through this incredibly interesting magic system and like the different impacts that it has had on the world which are in reality not so different from the ways that country resources were allocated but it makes it a lot more human when it's about language and these students in a way like this like it makes it so much easier to see the tangible impacts that existed in history regardless of whether or not we have magical silver bars that can do magical things and as a result of that like in yellow face you have characters that kind of only serve the purpose of being whatever role that they are in this machine you have a professor character who's just complicit in that and that is all that they are and then you have another character who's rebelling against that and that is really all that he is and there are a few other characters like that in this story that are not really given much depth beyond the monologues that they're giving in their scenes about these issues but to me a that's absolutely no different and certainly not worse than a lot of what the secret history did with its characterization in the back half essentially all of those characters also served a role in the depth that the narrative attempted to give them clearly was just for the purposes of them fitting thematically what the book was trying to say about the shallowness that's underlying the static of dark Academia right so yeah when this book is like that it's no worse than the secret history but also I just don't care there's enough life that's infused into the main cast of characters and especially in my opinion the protagonist of this book that it never feels dull it never feels boring it never feels just like a Manifesto so yeah I can like understand that critique in theory but also honestly I also think that if that's the reason that you hate this book as opposed to you maybe it just like isn't the type and style of book for you like it's a little bit slow paced it's pretty pensive it has a lot of like pretty intense linguistic Theory baked into the text so if you're just not interested in that like you're going to have a hard time I think getting through some of this book but if instead of that it's because you think that the characterization just went like too hard thematically on making colonization out to be a bad thing I think that my channel just might not be the place for you because like what like books like this that are excellent excellent novels to begin with but then in addition to that critique important things about the world that are bad and that are OB fiscated from us there's a lot of history in this book that I don't think I was taught because of the things that we choose to prioritize in history classes in the west and I'm going to get off my soap box but this is half of why I read the other half is to have a good time and to just enjoy something for the sake of enjoying it and to find characters that I love but it's half to learn more about the world around me and to think about really important questions about my place in history and the place of the people I love in history and like what we can do to make the world better no singular book is going to give you answers to those questions but the sum impact of reading a lot of books like this in my opinion can just be really really transformative anyways yeah I could have kept reading last night but I didn't have my like fancy camera with me and I could just feel myself emotionally beginning to shatter I just I'm remembering where I was I'm going to stop talking I just need to I just need to get through it I need to I need to be done oh it's so tense so tense I don't know what's going to happen it's all going to be [Music] okay [Music] no this is horrible I hate this book it's so good [Music] no she's evil the author's evil why can't just one of your books have a happy ending strongly recommend you should totally read the book trying to think about how to talk about this book I literally saw the end and coming I have like a third grade working understanding of ancient history so I had a feeling that what was going to happen was going to happen oh my God it's still just hit like it was the only place that the story could have gone but when you're reading it you're just like maybe that won't happen like maybe we'll go somewhere else and then we just went where I thought we would go the entire time I'm a Doomer thoughts feelings and opinions I thought this was a way more effective version of the critiques that A Book Like The Secret history is trying to make because it's really difficult to talk about elitism and class without also talking about race and especially if you're making historical argument like the the ways that Empires make money off of communities that they don't even see as human like it's hard to have conversations and split it up as much as a secret history did which is it makes its own point it says things but it's it's a very Western lens that book and the things that Babel says are different they have more Global implications it's less of an indictment of individual Obsession and intellectualism for the sake of intellectualism and more so just broadly all of the bad things that institutions like this do all the time constantly to everyone and all the things that need to happen in order for you to even stand a single fraction of a chance at making things different for the people that you love just all the fun little Hoops that you got to jump through to make that happen and it was really good it was really well done it was very effective I feel effectively destroyed inside I just feel like I go need to go lay in like a dark room and stew for the rest of my life because it's not just a book like this is the real world this woman had no right to do me like that oh but it's so good I just why is the world like this Society you should five stars you should read it for a second there I was like will I even cry because sometimes I just forget that I have emotions there's so much wrong there's just so much wrong and we don't even see the like and for what you know because the book's over we don't get to see the and for what so it's just it is what it is just for the baby how is a girl to just go on living my life little life in my little white room God anyways that's the video let me go grab the books this week I read these books and then Babble these are all pretty good and then Babble dark Academia what have I learned everything's dark the world is awful and suffering is all around us all of the time I don't know what to do with that but at least I don't want to go back to college anymore I could happily go the rest of my life never contributing to the college industrial complex ever again okay if you're wondering who wore it better it's Babble she wore it best but be warned going into this one it's it's a really good book it's just really good it's just it does good things to you when you read it only good things will happen yep I was like going to do this whole unpacking retrospective on the four books that I read at the end of this video no I I don't think I have anything else to say other than what I've already said I'm glad I read this last because I don't know how I could have like with a straight face read any of these books after this one I think that it just would have been a disaster for me they would have just felt so unserious I guess that's my thesis for this video like here's a bunch of pretty good books and then here's the one that unhinged my soul from my mortal coil and that's all I have to say about that I'm going to go like I don't know lay down no one knows what I'll do but I'm certainly going to go do it I'm going to stop filming so I never have to be perceived ever again if you liked this video You're a sist kidding I'm kidding I appreciate you you should like it actually duh with the YouTube give me that thumbs up and you should stick around if you want to read more books with me and go on more like fun light-hearted adventures just like the one that we've just been on together it was so Whimsical and fun wasn't it aren't you having a good time okay that's all I have to say I'm bye

Channel: lexi aka newlynova

Views: 325,516

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Id: vYxFhr-khgU

Length: 54min 6sec (3246 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 04 2023