Our first book was The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It’s one of those books that had been on so many people’s must-read lists so I was excited to see what all the hype was about. It’s dark, atmospheric, and beautifully written.

(Or maybe you don’t know from the very beginning that someone is dead because you accidentally skipped the prologue, jumped straight into Book I, and spent the entire novel wondering what the hell was going to happen. Just me? Okay.)

Amanda chose our first book, and The Secret History was definitely not something I would have picked up on my own. It had been on everyone else’s must-read list forever, but I’m much more of an Atomic Habits kind of book girl. (Great book, by the way.) Give me something that’s going to teach me how to reorganize my life, build better habits, or become a slightly more functional human and I’m in.

But that’s also exactly why I wanted to do this book club. I wanted to read things I wouldn’t necessarily gravitate toward on my own. And The Secret History ended up being such a good first pick — New England, an old college campus, Greek classics, morally questionable people, and the kind of atmosphere that makes you want to read with a cup of coffee while pretending it isn’t still 85 degrees outside in Florida.

It’s also a book that gives you a lot to talk about. Friendship, beauty, obsession, privilege, morality, belonging — and approximately 400 words I had to look up along the way.

My Thoughts — No Spoilers

I’ll be honest: I spent more than half of this book wondering when it was going to get good.

I knew people loved The Secret History, so I kept waiting for the thing to happen that would make me understand why. I wasn’t even sure what I was expecting — just that surely something was coming.

And then, somewhere along the way, I found myself up at 3am with my night table lamp dimmed low but just bright enough to read the pages. I have newborn twin girls, which means I’m regularly awake at 3 a.m. changing diapers, making bottles, feeding babies, and trying to convince someone to burp so we can all go back to sleep. Except I started finding myself actually excited for those middle-of-the-night feeds because it meant I could keep reading. I’d be sitting there burping a baby with one hand and holding my book with the other, dying to know… where this was going. (That sounds like a negative here, but it was exciting, I swear.)

Which is especially funny because, as I mentioned, I accidentally skipped the prologue. So I didn’t know what the book tells you from the beginning is going to happen. I spent most of the story genuinely wondering where all of this was going and what could possibly happen that had made people talk about this book for decades.

In hindsight, I’m kind of glad I read it that way. I’m sure the experience would have been completely different if I’d read the prologue like a normal person, but getting that moment as an actual surprise made the second half of the book so much fun for me.

And maybe that’s ultimately what won me over. The Secret History is definitely not fast-paced, but at some point I stopped waiting for something to happen and just became completely invested in these people and how this was all possibly going to end.

And the more I read, the more I kept thinking about how different these people actually were from who they thought they were. They saw themselves as smarter, more sophisticated and somehow above everyone else — meanwhile, they were making insane decisions and finding ways to justify all of them. And Richard might have been the worst about it. He romanticized everything just enough that you’d forget for a second how completely messed up the situation actually was.

From The Margins

My favorite thing about this book club is that it’s forcing me to slow down and do something simply because I enjoy it. I have a hard time doing anything that isn’t productive without feeling guilty about all the other things I could be getting done.

That being said, I also have an incredible ability to turn anything into a homework assignment. So naturally, I started annotating.

Usually when I’m reading and come across a word I don’t completely know, I can figure out what it means from the context and just keep going. But while reading this book, I made myself a rule: if I wasn’t confident enough in the meaning to actually use the word myself, I looked it up.

And I loved it. I wrote definitions in the margins and stopped to think about passages I would normally read right through. It made me slow down and actually pay attention to what I was reading instead of racing toward the end.

So yes, I did turn this book into a tiny homework assignment. But this one was fun — and it just happened to be productive, too.

The Words I Looked Up

Amanda called me right after I finished the book, and when I told her I was done she laughed because she genuinely thought I was lying. She was convinced I had secretly downloaded the audiobook because we have talked multiple times about how dense this book is.

She asked what I thought about it and the first thing out of my mouth was, “Do you think Richard is crazy?”

She immediately yelled at me not to give her any spoilers, which made me laugh because that is definitely not a spoiler.

My final thoughts on the book are honestly still a little bit of what did I just read?

At its core, this is a story about a group of college students who make one terrible decision and then keep making worse ones to protect themselves from it. They’re pretentious, dysfunctional, dramatic and somehow able to justify things that are… unjustifiable.

And yet, I couldn’t stop reading about them.

I spent probably the first half of the book wondering when it was going to get good, and then suddenly I was up at 3 a.m. feeding a baby and genuinely excited that I had an excuse to read another chapter. By the end, I was questioning whether Richard was crazy and briefly wondering if Henry was even real. (I’m not joking, I actually started to wonder if this story took place in Richard’s mind and these people were a figment of his imagination.)

I don’t know that I walked away with some profound interpretation of The Secret History. Mostly, I think it’s fascinating how a group of people who consider themselves so intelligent and sophisticated can make such unbelievably terrible decisions — and how easy it becomes for them to convince themselves that those decisions make sense.

Would I have picked this book for myself? Probably not. Am I glad Amanda did? Absolutely.

And honestly, that’s exactly why I wanted a book club in the first place.