donna tartt’s reading list
In an interview, Tartt lists her favorite authors and the names of a few works. I have listed the most popular works from each author and the specific ones she recommended as well.
Homer
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Greek Poets and Tragedians
Argonautica
Antigone
Prometheus Bound
The Oresteia
Medea
Oedipus Rex
The Bacchae
The Frogs
Dante
Inferno
Purgatorio
Paradiso
Shakespeare
“I went back and read Macbeth and Hamlet during the pandemic”
Macbeth
Hamlet
Dickens
“Dickens was a part of my familial landscape, the air I breathed.”
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations
Nabokov
Pale Fire
Lolita
Proust
In Search of Lost Time
Swann’s Way
Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment
The Brothers Karamazov
Yeats
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Irish Fairy and Folk Tales
Borges
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth
Ethan Frome
Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited
Helena
Salinger
Catcher in the Rye
Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway
Orlando
Edward St. Aubyn
The Patrick Melrose Novels
Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore
Norwegian Wood
Olga Tokarczuk
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Don DeLillo
White Noise
Underworld
W.G. Sebald
Austerlitz
The Rings of Saturn
Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking
The White Album
Other Specific Books
Memoirs d’Outre-Tome by Chateaubriand
Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford
All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski
A Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq
Actor AU Till doodle + some random scribbles because I find this emo Till in particular just kinda cute
The cult
Their own respective pieces will follow, containing spoilers from the book.
Paratise
Oh ok so it turns out ive been borrowing grief from the future ! it turns out ive been preparing to lose the things i love rather than basking in the light of them while they last. Maybe i should nt do that
For @autisticgremllin
She dived deeply under the dark waters, rising and falling with the waves, till at length she managed to reach the young prince, who was fast losing the power of swimming in that stormy sea. His limbs were failing him, his beautiful eyes were closed, and he would have died had not the little mermaid come to his assistance. She held his head above the water, and let the waves drift them where they would.
- Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid
girls don’t want boyfriends, girls want their fatal flaw, a morbid longing for the picturesque, to cause them to snap because “what could be more terrifying and beautiful to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?”
Odysseus after returning to Ithaca:
my drawing for @peachjooce, as a part of @bokumonoexchange!!! i really miss drawing chase, this piece as a whole was super fun to make :D i really hope you like it!!
you’re also my fav ap/tot artist but you didn’t hear that from me..
Just realized in the second half of chapter on in TSH Julian tells Richard that he always finds his students boring because he always knows what they'll do next. Then he knew what the group was gonna do to Bunny but he just didn't stop it. Tell me why I've never noticed this.