Books Mentioned in The Secret History by Donna Tartt
“When I could no longer concentrate on Greek and the alphabet began to transmute itself into incoherent triangles and pitchforks, I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favourite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.”
– Richard on insomnia and The Great Gatsby
Books Mentioned in The Secret History
- Poetics by Aristotle
- Agamemnon by Aeschylus
- Inferno by Dante
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Bacchae by Euripedes
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
- The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- The Final Problem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (alongside other mentions of Sherlock Holmes)
- Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
- The Divine Comedy by Dante
- The Greeks and the Irrational by E.R. Dodds
- The Republic by Plato
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- The Superman comic
- The Upanishads
- “With Rue My Heart is Laden” by A.E. Housman
- “Lycidas” by John Milton
- “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Lord Alfred Tennyson
- “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae
- The New Testament
- Anthony Janson’s History of Art
- “Why so pale and wan fond lover?” by Sir John Suckling
- Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson
- The Revenger’s Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur (now attributed to Thomas Middleton)
- Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
- Terence – Andria (“Hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears)
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.”
– A random quotation from Crime and Punishment, without citation, in The Secret History
Other Authors Mentioned
“He was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing…”Like something from Tolstoy, isn’t it?” he remarked.”
– Henry making a strange, perhaps not entirely accurate, comparison to Tolstoy
Have you read and enjoyed The Secret History by Donna Tartt? Alternatively, what other ‘books about books’ are favourites of yours?
Retreat Into The Sanctuary & Enjoy Seven Days to Reset
Love books, feeling a little lost right now, and looking for some comfort and guidance forwards? I made The Sanctuary exactly for this.