Cellar Door

We all want to be fully seen and understood, but it's not shallow or meaningless to just have a pal you talk about TV shows with who isn't also, like, your platonic soulmate. That's still your friend! You still enhance each other's lives with your company. Not everything that matters is profound.

I think a lot of you are lonely because you're waiting around for someone who sees into your soul instead of just plain old lookin' at the people in your life, finding common ground, and planting a little garden there. Even if that garden only grows Star Trek fan theories and memes, it's still good.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

Hello! I replied to this post on Reddit today, trying to compile all the dark academia books I could think of, and then thought that maybe all of you here might find it useful too, so here you go. It is a very, very broad list, a mix of classic and contemporary literature, and there is no set criteria besides having a dark vibe (this includes murder and crime but could just be the way it’s written as well) and portraying an academic setting, most of the time from the student’s point of view. I haven’t read all of these myself and so I can’t judge on quality, but hopefully this will inspire people to add on to it in the comments.

Here you go!

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman Truly, Devious by Maureen Johnson The Secret History, Donna Tartt If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio Maurice by E. M. Forster The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Possession by A.S. Byatt The Truants by Kate Weinberg The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark Vicious by V. E. Schwab The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater (tangentially related) A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro The Likeness by Tana French The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (coming out tomorrow!) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman Oleanna by David Mamet Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Hello! I replied to this post on Reddit today, trying to compile all the dark academia books I could think of, and then thought that maybe all of you here might find it useful too, so here you go. It is a very, very broad list, a mix of classic and contemporary literature, and there is no set criteria besides having a dark vibe (this includes murder and crime but could just be the way it’s written as well) and portraying an academic setting, most of the time from the student’s point of view. I haven’t read all of these myself and so I can’t judge on quality, but hopefully this will inspire people to add on to it in the comments.

Here you go!

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman Truly, Devious by Maureen Johnson The Secret History, Donna Tartt If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio Maurice by E. M. Forster The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Possession by A.S. Byatt The Truants by Kate Weinberg The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark Vicious by V. E. Schwab The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater (tangentially related) A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro The Likeness by Tana French The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (coming out tomorrow!) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman Oleanna by David Mamet Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

In honour of my favourite genre, have a very personal, very subjective recommendations list!

-        The Secret History (Donna Tartt)

The obvious choice, a classic. In my personal opinion, it’s not perfect and there are better dark academia books out there, but it has massively shaped the genre and therefore deserves recognition. Also, the aesthetic is on point! Read if you want to get a feel for the genre or if you’re simply curious.

-        If We Were Villains (M. L. Rio)

Basically a newer, better The Secret History?? Plenty of similarities, minus certain problematic bits that were present in TSH. Amazing prose, incredible characters, absolutely worth the read. A prime example of dark academia! Read if you love Shakespeare and college settings and compelling characters and drama and just beautiful writing!

-        Black Chalk (Christopher J. Yates)

Also a fairly good example of the genre, but tragically underhyped. Darker than, for example, If We Were Villains. Set at Oxford! Will mess with your head. The characters are not necessarily likeable, but interesting. The writing is fairly complex. Read for a dark academia thriller which takes the unreliable narrator to an impressive new extreme (in a good way!)

-        Truly Devious (Maureen Johnson)

A rare YA dark academia book! Read for murder and mystery and a beautiful boarding school setting as well as a really likeable main character! Due to its nature less dark and somewhat less mature than most of the other books on this list, but if you’re looking for more of a quick and fun dark academia read, this is the one for you!

In a similar vain: The Vanishing Stair (Maureen Johnson)

Cannot actually vouch for this as I haven’t read it yet, but it’s the sequel to Truly Devious and I have heard good things.

-        The Secret Place (Tana French)

MASSIVELY underappreciated dark academia with (gasp) supernatural elements?! The most beautiful prose and funniest dialogue you will ever see. Incredible characters. Again, amazing boarding school setting and close group of female friends! (They will break your heart). Also murder. Also half of the story being told from a detective’s PoV. Read if you value good literature. Just. Read it.

-        The Likeness (Tana French)

Actually, maybe I was kidding before, maybe this book is the most underappreciated dark academia book out there? Either way, it’s my favourite. Within dark academia and within ALL OF THE BOOKS. This is it. The perfect novel. Characters that own my hearts to this day. Writing so beautiful that it had me sobbing uncontrollably on several occasions. The university it is set in is Trinity College Dublin. (Cue me being bitter that I don’t go there every single day for the rest of my life.) Very intriguing mystery, too. Hilarious dialogue. All the emotions. All the heartbreak. Just… I love it so much, okay? <3

-        The Lying Game (Ruth Ware)

Good, very good. Set in a boarding school near the ocean, but unfortunately, only the past tense story line is and we don’t get to see too much of it. Very interesting characters. Much heavier on the dark than the academia. Read if you’re looking for more of a classic murder mystery/thriller and are not too focussed on the academia. Also read for an interesting group of female friends.

-        The Basic Eight (Daniel Handler)

Very promising, but wasn’t my cup of tea at all. The setting is an American High School on the West Coast. The murder isn’t that much of a mystery. I’m mentioning it here because I know that other people love this book, even though I really didn’t. I would say don’t read, but see for yourself, I suppose.

-        The Lessons (Naomi Alderman)

Yes, okay, an interesting one. Set at Oxford, which was amazing. Interesting characters with interesting dynamics. I read it quickly and was quite entertained. But there were certain problematic bits (regarding LGBTQ+ representation and mental illness), so you’ve been warned. Not my fave, but I mostly enjoyed it while reading it.

There are a few more dark academia books on my shelves, which I unfortunately cannot include on this list, as I haven’t read them yet. One of them is “The Lake of Dead Languages” by Carol Goodman. Another is “Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh. Might edit this post later to add these and more. xx

UPDATE!! (With slightly longer descriptions this time, because people are actually reading this? Reblogging even? Wow!) 

-        The Lake of Dead Languages (Carol Goodman)

THE ALL-FEMALE DARK ACADEMIA NOVEL WE ALL NEED AND DESERVE…?? The setting is A++. An all-female boarding school in the Adirondack Mountains in New York! There is a lake that features so heavily in the story, it basically counts as a main character. Told from the PoV of a teacher who used to go to the school. There are two close groups of female friends, one in the present timeline, one in the past. Both have dark, dark secrets and both fit the dark academia genre so well! Also, heavy focus on Latin rather than Ancient Greek, which I have all the love for. This one is a gem, so give it a chance!

-        Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)

An actual classic, as in… first published in 1945. And it reads like it. The beginning came with beautiful vibes! Our young boy Charles starting his time at Oxford, meeting a lot of pretentious people, including one Lord Sebastian Flyte, who Charles is suspiciously fascinated by. Sebastian is the biggest dork to ever dork, carries around with him an actual teddy bear named Aloysius, the absolute madmen?? But it’s all downhill from there, with alcoholism and war and depressing times… And Oxford only really features in the first half or less.

-        People Like Us (Dana Mele)

Another rare YA dark academia!! Features a group of Mean Girls who one day, when out at night to go swimming, find one of their classmates floating dead in the lake. Which is an excellent dark academia set-up, let’s be honest. Also, sapphic girls, incredible sapphic girls with really complex relationships! Bi main character! A fun and quick read, much like “Truly Devious”. More descriptions of the beautiful boarding school buildings would have been welcome, but at least we got a few! Anyway, go forth and enjoy this little beauty.

-        Party Girls Die in Pearls (Plum Sykes)

Umm… I barely even comprehend this book’s existence? Has a prime dark academia set-up with a murdered girl in Oxford, but I still somehow DNF’d it after about 20 pages?! The main character’s name is Ursula Flowerbutton, and if you think that’s quirky and funny… good for you, you might actually enjoy this book. But you’ll also have to endure descriptions of clothes, oh, so many descriptions of clothes! And for anything unique to Oxford that might make the book fun because only those who know will know… you’ll get a footnote. So actually, everyone will know, with zero effort. Definitely not for me, but if you want to read a glossy magazine style dark academia, knock yourself out, friend!

-        The Night Climbers (Ivo Stourton)

Breath-taking! A piece of beauty! Set at Cambridge (and the campus features heavily!), a main character reminiscent of Richard Papen, an intriguing group of new friends that he would do anything to belong with. Including… climbing the buildings of Cambridge at night? Without proper equipment, just with his hands and feet?? Honestly, out of the books on this list, this one is the closest in style and maturity and characterisation to The Secret History! The writing is absolutely gorgeous, the plot fascinating. And it’s dark academia that features a non-violent crime, which works surprisingly well. All in all: A STUNNER THAT FANS OF THE SECRET HISTORY SHOULD CHECK OUT!!

-        As I Descended (Robyn Talley)

A queer, sapphic Macbeth retelling?? Also a rare YA dark academia with strong supernatural elements?! The representation is on point, with two hispanic main characters, wlw, mlm and one of the girls in the main couple being disabled! The boarding school setting is also on point (and uniquely different as the school building is actually a former plantation in Virginia). This book is so different and so spooky! It wasn’t perfect and some say the retelling didn’t work 100% (I, personally, felt that the plot slowed down a bit), but the atmosphere is amazing and the characters are pretty cool, too!

Hello! I replied to this post on Reddit today, trying to compile all the dark academia books I could think of, and then thought that maybe all of you here might find it useful too, so here you go. It is a very, very broad list, a mix of classic and contemporary literature, and there is no set criteria besides having a dark vibe (this includes murder and crime but could just be the way it’s written as well) and portraying an academic setting, most of the time from the student’s point of view. I haven’t read all of these myself and so I can’t judge on quality, but hopefully this will inspire people to add on to it in the comments.

Here you go!

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman Truly, Devious by Maureen Johnson The Secret History, Donna Tartt If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio Maurice by E. M. Forster The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Possession by A.S. Byatt The Truants by Kate Weinberg The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark Vicious by V. E. Schwab The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater (tangentially related) A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro The Likeness by Tana French The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (coming out tomorrow!) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman Oleanna by David Mamet Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it

even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?

Art by Jian Guo