The Secret History is an older book..not old like Moby Dick…but old like in it was a best seller in 1992. My friend Miles brought it for me as it’s one of his favorite books. I must admit – I haven’t been reading much Fiction lately – but it was fun to get lost in a story again…one that didn’t make me cry and be horrified by world history.

I really enjoyed the book – it was a bit slow the first 90 pages, but once it got over the hurdle…it sprinted! The book is about 6 college students in a little New England college studying classic languages. They all seemed rather normal in the beginning – sure, each of them had their quirks and they wouldn’t necessarily be people that I would hang out with – but they were decent none the less. The plot is about how they went from this normal existence to a place that was manipulative, incestuous, and evil. They went too far and couldn’t really undo what they had done, so they spent the 2nd half of the book living with trying to cover up their actions and descending further down a spiral of lies and deciet. If you know me…you know that I don’t like romantic fluff; instead I like the strange, depressing, grim stories…and this was one of them!

I enjoyed the writing style the most. It had this way of giving you just enough information to capture your interest, to want more, and then it would pull away….like most of the men I am interested in! In the prologue it eludes to the fact that this group of friends committed a murder… so there was no big surprise element to the book..instead it was more of a journey through how they got to that point and how they scrambled afterwards and mentally crumbled. There was a ton of irony to deal with…such as the fact that one of the boys was the pallbearer for the man that he murdered….that weighs heavy on the mind and it was fun to read about – it gave your mind a lot to chew on.

Overall- I liked the book, and I liked the break from the normal historical or travel memoirs that I’ve been reading. It wasn’t light fluff…it was definitely meaty!