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Man, Dark Academia as a literary subgenre is something that I have struggled with.
On paper, it ticks all the boxes. A heavy focus on academic life, learning for the sake of learning, a love of history, linguistics and myth, the cutthroat nature of elitism, the hollow feeling of disillusionment. Just everything that should make me absolutely love it. Seriously, compiling all of those things together into a book should make that my favorite book.
AND YET.....every dark academia book I've read as been absolute garbage. Books so bad they made me forget why I love reading.
Donna Tartt, Alex Michaelides....it's on sight with these fuckers. I get genuinely angry thinking about these books. I was not even able to write actual reviews of them because I got so fucking angry whenever I tried.
Other DA books I've read have been mostly just meh. So forgettable that I couldn't even give a synopsis of them.
It's a subgenre that I want to love, but all of my attempts have failed so miserably.
I'm currently reading The Cloisters and Babel right now and if these are bad too, I'm just giving up.
I've heard a lot of praise for Babel so I'm hoping it's going to be a light in the darkness for me. But I also heard people praise The Secret History to the moon and back and that book's so horrible in every way that I literally want to burn it.
Please let there actually be good Dark Academia books out there. I can't take anymore disappointment