literacouture

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Arcadia, Tom Stoppard

Franny and Zooey, J.D Salinger

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Captain’s Verses, Pablo Neruda

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

um, I don’t really know? I never consciously tried to emulate writers, and I’ve never deliberately tried to change my writing style either? I’ve noticed it will shift from harsh and crude and minimal to florid and indulgent and expansive depending on the tone and nature of the story I want to write?

(For example, the archetype series, I really let myself go for that eternal, unapologetically mystical, spiritual, and actively try to engage and use the language of whatever archetype I’m doing, and create images with my words that feed into that public consciousness that’s grown from countless narratives and texts. I don’t always succeed, but it’s fun to let my brain get completely swallowed by the microcosm of all these different worlds and narratives for a little bit.)

The great thing about growing up in fandom is that you have the best writing workshop in the world at your fingertips, and sometimes it’s not even about the constructive criticism, but just the fact of getting feedback that fuels you and drives you to write more, and the more you write, the better you get, like, exponentially. I am not kidding around here. There might be some innate seed to writing, but I’m more of the opinion it’s almost completely experience, both intaking (inhaling books, especially when you’re young as with me, but not necessarily) and output.

Between just my one early massive fanfic and the first draft of a novel I wrote about three years ago, I wrote about 200 000 words. That’s not even counting all the short, one off fics, all the random poetry and concept writing, all the hundreds and hundreds of folders full of random snippets and stories and journal entries I have. That’s a heck of a lot of hours upon hours of sheer writing. It’s just time, is my true, honest conclusion, time and need (if I don’t write I get sad and angry and I don’t fit right into my skin, and I forget every damn time why until I write something and everything, my entire universe releases this breath it’s been holding.)

But a few seminal influences that really gripped me have been:

Fitzgerald and Hemingway, for teaching me that being extravagant with my prose is just as valid as being brutally minimal. 

the vast vast amount of scifi and fantasy I read growing up and as a teenager, where I inhaled everything I could get my hands on, which I think must have really ingrained in my the overarching, almost spiritual nature of hero, anti-hero, villain, love and the burning through of weakness and all those eternal narrative structures of character arc.

(and also gave me a deep appreciation for and enjoyment of ridiculous melodrama)

the rage behind every word hunter s. thompson ever wrote.

spanish-language literature such as márquez and borges (in translation), which showed me how time is the slave of the narrative, not the other way around, and that the mystical and magical saturate every inch of our lives and the glory of that, and that you don’t have to be afraid of letting it wind around every inch of your words, envelop the reader and explode outward through the lines, just for fear of that making it ‘not realistic’

People like Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Douglas Adams for teaching me that humour and ‘little’ (not end of the world style) narratives can be just as powerful and touching as any epic.

I was exposed to a lot of myths at a very young age, read the bible at 10 of my own volition, read anthologies of greek myths, all those kinds of things, which have become immensely useful to me quite recently in making sense of why certain narratives and characters grip me so, and probably have contributed to my obsessions with the more mystical aspects of our bodies and natures.

on that note, the wordplay as a means of exploring and expressing fierce adoration of the ridiculous and sublime beauty of the universe and human nature that saturates Stoppard’s work.

Finally, and it’s cliche, but The Outsider, by Camus, which I read at fifteen and wildly spiralling and disorganized in my growing spiritual atheism, and gave me the roadmap to humanism. which doesn’t seem like an influence on my writing style so much as my world view, but holy hell, i would not, could not write like i write if I was not adamantly in love with humanity’s utter freedom to pursue and love and destroy and build and grow like I am.

I’ve done an archetype on this very trope here, that includes - as is my wont - a fair amount of meta. I’ve also got the tag codependent aristocratic siblings, however I’ve only just started using it so there’s not much there yet!

I would recommend reading/watching:

The Secret History, by Donna Tart

Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger

The Royal Tenenbaums

Gladiator

Rome (HBO)

The Borgias (Showtime) (in fact anything Borgias, all the Borgias! except the fiction, don’t read the fiction)

The later seasons of The Vampire Diaries, where the originals come in.

Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert

The Brothers Bloom

edited to add:

Cruel Intentions (thank you for reminding me anon!)

Game of Thrones/ASOIAF (Cersei/Jaime is blatantly textual, as is Theon/Asha to a different degree, can read: Tyrells, Starks, Martells (older gen + sandsnakes particularly), Targeryens, basically most noble houses are going to be fucked up families in different ways, so take your pick)

Simon/River from Firefly

Scarlet Witch + Quicksilver (marvel)

House of Yes

 (noting that I use the term ‘aristocratic’ loosely to denote any particular secret or status or heritage that elevates/separates said siblings from reality or normality on some level) (also codependent denoting any kind of relationship from the sweet to the vicious to the incestuous in which sibling behaviour of an unusual closeness or intensity takes place)

Because of reasons.

The downloads are .zips so that the cyberpolice don’t break down my door, and within the .zips is an .epub of the book. You can view them on your computer with FBReader, or on an iOS device with Readmill. I’ve also linked the Goodreads page for each book so you can see whether or not the book is up your alley, and read what other people thought of it.

This is not necessarily a recommendation post because I haven’t yet read all of these, nor is it a comprehensive collection of every Borgia book out there: it’s just pretty much every Borgia ebook out there. Enjoy!

NON-FICTION:

Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy by Sarah Bradford (mediafire / box) Cesare Borgia: His Life and Times by Sarah Bradford (mediafire / box) The Borgias: The Hidden History by G.J. Meyer (mediafire / box) The Borgias and Their Enemies by Christopher Hibbert (mediafire / box) The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (mediafire / box). While this is more of a political and philosophical read, Machiavelli was fan of Cesare and often cites his actions.

FICTION: (Approach with caution, take with a grain of salt, etc.)

The Poisoner Mysteries by Sara Poole (mediafire / box) The Lucrezia Borgia books by Jean Plaidy (mediafire / box) Sins of the House of Borgia by Sarah Bower (mediafire / box) The Family by Mario Puzo (mediafire / box)

monks

medieval monks in italy in 1327

a Franciscan monk sleuth from england named William of Baskerville

(a reference to both sherlock holmes and william of occam [think occam’s razor])

queer monks who have ambiguous visions of their dead lovers

a sex scene that is entirely quotations from the Bible and religious writings

(because if you are a monk you think about everything in religious terms)

monks who burn too brightly in their faith and die because of it

monk murderers

religion-as-politics type machinations of the roman catholic church

medieval monastic library

medieval monastic labyrinth library

with a blind librarian

named jorge of burgos

the subversion of language

books that are eaten that poison the eaters

(if anyone remembers the book of revelation that should sound familiar)

(if anyone remembers the book of revelation a lot of this novel will sound familiar)

doomed religious fanatics

a man who knows no language entirely who speaks in a ridiculous mixture of about ten languages but everyone understands him anyway

TOSC-IN:

A database enabling you to search for keywords in article titles from c.160 Classics related journals. Provides a link to an abstract or full text version if one exists online.

Classical and Medieval History:

Annotated list of Reference Websites

Diotima: Women and Gender in the Ancient World

Online database and resources for studying Women and Gender in the ancient world.

Encyclopedia of the Hellenic World:

“Original electronic project aiming at collecting, recording, documenting, presenting and promoting the historical data that testify to the presence of Hellenic culture throughout time and space.”

Perseus Digital Library:

A showcase of digital and print resources for Classical studies. 

World Archaeology:

Books, Magazines, Blogs, Travel. All Archaeology related.

Akropolis World News:

The news of the world in Ancient Greek- a great way to learn and practice the language. 

House of Ptolomy:

Portal website on the Ptolomatic (holla!) Empire. 

Star Myths and Constellation Lore:

Information website about the above. 

Virgil.com:

Basically a portal site and resource for information on all things Virgil. 

Homerica:

Portal and Resource. Link is in French, but you can have the website translated to any language. 

Exploring Ancient World Culture:

“On-line course supplement for students and teachers of the ancient and medieval worlds.”

Subject Centre for History, Classics, and Archaeology:

“The Subject Centre for History, Classics and Archaeology is part of the Higher Education Academy.”

The Iris Project:

"an educational charity introducing the languages and culture of the ancient world to UK state schools in order to enrich the curriculum.”

Roman Law Resources

“ information on Roman law sources and literature, the teaching of Roman law, and the persons who study Roman law.”

Egyptology Resources

“World Wide Web resource for Egyptological information.”

ABZU:

“guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world.”

Resource Lists by School: All links are to Classics, or Antiquities portals for more resource lists. 

Oxford Libraries

Cambridge Libraries

University of Toronto

Berkeley Classics Department

Library of Congress: Classics and Medieval History

Virginia Tech: Electronic Antiquity

Brock University: Classics Research Guide

Cambridge Ancient History Series

Williams.

University of Texas

Princeton University

Dalhousie University

University of Texas @ Austin

Columbia University

Text Databases [Via Oxford]:

Antiquity

American Journal of Archaeology

Archaeology Magazine

Arion

Cambridge Archaeological Journal

Classical Philology

Classical Quarterly

Classical Review

Eranos

Greece & Rome

Journal of Near Eastern Studies

Journal of Field Archaeology

Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies

Journal of Roman Archaeology

Kernos

Phoenix

Pomoerium

Syllecta Classica

Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphie

Gateways:

Argos - search-engine for all major classical resources

Classics Section of the Intute gateway.

Voice of the Shuttle Classics Page from University of California, Santa Barbara

Classical and Biblical Literary Research Tools compiled by Jack Lynch at Penn

Reading Classics Gateway

Kirke Katalog der Internetressourcen für die Klassische Philologie

NOTE: So I compiled a list of some of my favorite classics sites to use. I also put in links to other school’s departments and libraries. Almost all Universities which have Classics departments have resources lists. If you want to add to the list, please do!

All of the schools above have much more extensive lists for you to use! I made this list in little over half an hour, so there is much room to be expanded on. 

NEW ADDITIONS: 

Latin Library at Packard Humanities Institute - http://latin.packhum.org/ (PHI numbers standard way to refer to Latin texts, look at the ones Perseus uses - it’s PHI).

Brepolis - http://www.brepolis.net/ - may need to access this via your institution or its ezproxy (includes the Library of Latin Texts A and B LLT-A and LLT-B and many other interesting resources).

L’Annee Philologique - http://www.annee-philologique.com - another one in which you’ll have to use via your institution’s ezproxy or other online database (we use ebscohost). Many journals you submit articles to expect references to other journals use the abbreviations in APh.

For databases of journals, first start at JSTOR - http://www.jstor.org - again, institutional access is required.

((Via: monumentum))

The Latin Library - A collection of Classical and Medieval texts in Latin, organized by author. 

The Internet Ancient History Sourcebook - A collection of mostly primary source texts translated into English.  Not comprehensive, but covers a broad range of topics.

um, I don’t really know? I never consciously tried to emulate writers, and I’ve never deliberately tried to change my writing style either? I’ve noticed it will shift from harsh and crude and minimal to florid and indulgent and expansive depending on the tone and nature of the story I want to write?

(For example, the archetype series, I really let myself go for that eternal, unapologetically mystical, spiritual, and actively try to engage and use the language of whatever archetype I’m doing, and create images with my words that feed into that public consciousness that’s grown from countless narratives and texts. I don’t always succeed, but it’s fun to let my brain get completely swallowed by the microcosm of all these different worlds and narratives for a little bit.)

The great thing about growing up in fandom is that you have the best writing workshop in the world at your fingertips, and sometimes it’s not even about the constructive criticism, but just the fact of getting feedback that fuels you and drives you to write more, and the more you write, the better you get, like, exponentially. I am not kidding around here. There might be some innate seed to writing, but I’m more of the opinion it’s almost completely experience, both intaking (inhaling books, especially when you’re young as with me, but not necessarily) and output.

Between just my one early massive fanfic and the first draft of a novel I wrote about three years ago, I wrote about 200 000 words. That’s not even counting all the short, one off fics, all the random poetry and concept writing, all the hundreds and hundreds of folders full of random snippets and stories and journal entries I have. That’s a heck of a lot of hours upon hours of sheer writing. It’s just time, is my true, honest conclusion, time and need (if I don’t write I get sad and angry and I don’t fit right into my skin, and I forget every damn time why until I write something and everything, my entire universe releases this breath it’s been holding.)

But a few seminal influences that really gripped me have been:

Fitzgerald and Hemingway, for teaching me that being extravagant with my prose is just as valid as being brutally minimal. 

the vast vast amount of scifi and fantasy I read growing up and as a teenager, where I inhaled everything I could get my hands on, which I think must have really ingrained in my the overarching, almost spiritual nature of hero, anti-hero, villain, love and the burning through of weakness and all those eternal narrative structures of character arc.

(and also gave me a deep appreciation for and enjoyment of ridiculous melodrama)

the rage behind every word hunter s. thompson ever wrote.

spanish-language literature such as márquez and borges (in translation), which showed me how time is the slave of the narrative, not the other way around, and that the mystical and magical saturate every inch of our lives and the glory of that, and that you don’t have to be afraid of letting it wind around every inch of your words, envelop the reader and explode outward through the lines, just for fear of that making it ‘not realistic’

People like Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Douglas Adams for teaching me that humour and ‘little’ (not end of the world style) narratives can be just as powerful and touching as any epic.

I was exposed to a lot of myths at a very young age, read the bible at 10 of my own volition, read anthologies of greek myths, all those kinds of things, which have become immensely useful to me quite recently in making sense of why certain narratives and characters grip me so, and probably have contributed to my obsessions with the more mystical aspects of our bodies and natures.

on that note, the wordplay as a means of exploring and expressing fierce adoration of the ridiculous and sublime beauty of the universe and human nature that saturates Stoppard’s work.

Finally, and it’s cliche, but The Outsider, by Camus, which I read at fifteen and wildly spiralling and disorganized in my growing spiritual atheism, and gave me the roadmap to humanism. which doesn’t seem like an influence on my writing style so much as my world view, but holy hell, i would not, could not write like i write if I was not adamantly in love with humanity’s utter freedom to pursue and love and destroy and build and grow like I am.

[made rebloggable by request]

read like a motherfucker. don’t learn from your betters, just inhale them. imprint rhythms and chokeholds and things-that-shoot-up-your-spine into your fingertips. read how romance novels create characters so vivid you want to fuck them and have them be fucked. read brutal minimalism and extravagant prose. read children’s books to remember about wonder and post-modernists to remember about freedom. read because at some point you will be so full with the consumption of language you will need to start pouring it back out again.

write like an asshole. write things when you’ve stayed up so late you are delirious. write when you’re drunk. write when a song has made you feel catastrophic. write when you’re famished. write when you’re spitting mad. write so you don’t curl up in the bottom of a shower and sob. write when people have torn strips off you. write when you’re high on adrenaline. write because there’s a monster on your back and you need to make it real and separate from your soul. eventually, you will not need any of these props to make you brave enough.

Hello there! Thank you so much for your kind words. Now, this answer will most likely look like a master post of my book recs, and I’m sorry about that. 

Let’s start with the Antiquity classics. The fundamentals and best known are these :

The Odyssey, HomerThe Iliad, HomerThe Aeneid, VirgileMetamorphoses, OvidDialogues, PlatoThe Symposium, PlatoPolitics or Poetics, AristotleIf Not, Winter, Sappho

PLAYS : 

Euripides — MedeaHippolytosIphigenia in TaurisBacchaeThe OresteiaSophocles — Theban plays : Antigone, Oedipus King, Oedipus at ColonusAjax

If you want to read Anne Carson’s delightful translations of Greek Tragedies, you can find a list here.

If you want my advice on starting up on poetry, you can click here.

You can find four random poetry recs here too.

And also, you can read my longest list of recommendations on poetry here.

I’d be happy to give you more on either subject if you ask me something a bit more specific.

[Dark Academia book recs of all the different kinds I could think of. It's a long journey. Buckle up.]

The Classic Dark Academic :

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Anything by the Brontë sisters

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (this book birthed Dark Academia)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Short stories by Edgar Allan Poe

Bram Stokers Dracula

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

Maurice by EM Forster

Madam Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Good Man is Hard to Find

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Macbeth by Shakespeare

Othello by Shakespeare

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

The Poetry-lover Academic:

Poetry of Baudelaire

Odes of Keats (ALL OF THEM ARE A MUST READ)

Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (especially The Raven)

Shelley's Alastor, Prometheus Unbound, Masque of Anarchy

Kubla Khan by Coleridge

T.S Elliott's Wasteland

all Emily Dickinson poetry but especially 'I felt a funeral in my brain', 'Because I could not stop for death' (read them a thousand times already)

Pablo Neruda's Nothing but Death

Langston Hughes Poems

Tennyson's Lotos eater (underrated gem)

Sylvia Plath poems but special mentions to Lady Lazarus and the Bell jar

Paradise Lost by Milton (if you want to include something about the Devil in your list)

Poems by Sappho

Poems of Charles Bukowski (especially Love Is a Dog from Hell)

The Contemporary Dark Academic:

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (the origin of Dark Academia)

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Ace of Spades by Amanda Foody (could recommend it a hundred times)

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

If We Were Villains by ML Rio

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

The Girls are all so nice here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

The Likeness by Tana French

Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro

One of us is lying by Karen Mcmanus

Bunny by Mona Awad

The Plot by Jean Hanff

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Conversion by Katherine Howe

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Quaint and Curious Volume

We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Lying Games by Ruth Ware

Black Chalk by Christopher J Yates

The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt

The Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Bad Habits by Charleigh Rose

Good Girls Lie by JT Ellison

Shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

Queer Dark Academic:

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (yes, yes, yes it's the gay shit)

Notes on a Scandal (What was she thinking?) by Zoë Heller

Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (lesbian vampire, hell yeah!)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Maurice by EM Forster

Christabel by Coleridge

Poems by Sappho

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

Ace of Spades by Amanda Foody

The Dark Romantic Academic:

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Likeness by Tana French

The Temple House by Rachel Donohue

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Mythological Dark Academic:

(pardon me for my cluelessness)

I have not really read much about mythology but if Norse mythology is the area of your interest, Neil Gaiman is the God of it. (aka not only Good Omens and American Gods, but also the book 'Norse Mythology')

The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Circe by Madeline Miller

Ovid's Metamorphoses for Greek mythology enthusiasts