Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
A man made of smoke.Utterly beautiful and heartbreaking.
★★✰✰✰ (2 stars)The premise itself was enough to intrigue me. A close-knit group of friends attending Oxford? Yes please. Naomi Alderman's style lends itself well for this: it has a 'polish' that evokes notions of privilege. However, the characters and plot do not convey the good qualities of Alderman's style. Throughout, there is a sort of entitlement which feels hollow: Oxford is not the forefront of the story, and it is the annoying attitude of the characters which render this novel so self-im...
Reminded me of The Secret History and Brideshead Revisited, so yes, of course I loved it.
Christ Stopped at San CeretinoI won’t be the first reviewer of The Lessons by Naomi Alderman to point out its two unequal parts; the first a conventional coming of age narrative ensconced in all the adornment of an elite university, and the second a more complex story that explores larger questions of pain, self-loathing, and dependency. Read as a whole, however, the book falls disappointingly short of being a well constructed piece of fiction.By means of belabored allusion, the antagonist and c...
"This moment, like all moments, would be lost." This book is a story of being alone, of trying to find yourself in a large world that expects so much of you, and when that is too difficult or terrifying, hiding yourself in the safe confines of friendship and what you know; of trying to discover the truth of existence, of the wistfulness of youth that loses you, and you yourself with it; of being in love with someone who hurts you, who is no good for you because they are and will never be good
The Lessons, Naomi Alderman's second novel, is reminiscent of Donna Tartt's famous The Secret History - featuring a young and naive narrator from a relatively poor background, who enrolls in at a prestigious university (Tartt's is located in a sleepy Vermont town) where he falls in with a group of quirky, overly privileged and rich young people, and learns their ways by participating in the crazy things they do. The Secret History was not the first novel to do that, but it was undoubtedly the mo...
As you may already know, The Secret History by Donna Tartt is one of my favourite books, possibly my all-time favourite. Nothing in all the modern fiction I've ever read has matched it, so I tend to be interested when reviews compare a new novel to it, as they often do - particularly with novels by relatively young female authors, like this one. There are indeed many similarities between the two, and at the beginning in particular the influence of Tartt's modern classic is so obvious that The Le...
feeling empty😜
tw for self harm, suicide ideations, domestic abuseRep: male bi mcs* you know that trope where there's an unhealthy gay relationship in a literary novel? this book exemplifies that trope. if you look that trope up, you will see a picture of this book. not only is the relationship unhealthy, it's manipulative, and at the end you see it's also abusive. thanks for that.* the two main characters who have this relationship are both bi (i assume, given that it's never said, but they both have relation...
2,5 stars, rounded up to a 3. May change later.Seems like Naomi Alderman read The Secret History and was like "What if the Classics group HAD stayed in Francis' country house like they wished they did?" and ran with it, a bit unsuccessfully.Many other reviewers have pointed out the similarities between The Lessons and The Secret History so I'm not being the least bit original right now, but here it comes: there's no WAY Naomi Alderman hasn't read TSH. There's a not-rich (but not poor, either) PO...
I don't normally bother to write reviews, but considering how little known this book is and how amazing it turned out to be, here I go.He had been the centre, the one who bound us together, because beside him we seemed more similar to each other. Without him, Emmanuella was too rich, and Franny too opiniated, and Simon too shallow. Without him, we were just a scattering of people.I feel like it's important to point out that this book is for a particular crowd of people. Not everyone is going to
