#katy hays

[oldshrewsburyian]

Nothing, I knew, was as powerful as curiosity. I had always considered it more powerful than lust. After all, wasn't that why Adam bit into the apple? Because he was curious? Because he needed to know? For research.

The Cloisters, Katy Hays

#book quotes #the cloisters #katy hays #adultbooklrquotes #currently reading #queue

[bruiselikeviolets]

read in 2023: the cloisters by katy hays

Was your fate already written? Was it predestined? Or, could you alter its course? And, did you have the free will to do so?

#the cloisters #katy hays #bookedit #litedit #read 2023 #stuff #this was like the secret history but a lot less unnecessary text. and also art #and more female characters lol

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The Cloisters

By Katy Hays.

#The Cloisters #Katy Hays

[aliteraryprincess]

Nothing, I knew, was as powerful as curiosity. I had always considered it more powerful than lust. After all, wasn't that why Adam bit into the apple? Because he was curious? Because he needed to know? For research.

Katy Hays, The Cloisters

#booklr #book quotes #the cloisters #katy hays #books

[blogmollylane]

Currently reading: The Cloisters by Katy Hays

#fiction #reading #books #currently reading #mystery #thriller #suspense #psychological #supernatural #fantasy #gothic #art #the cloisters #Katy hays #new york #tea and books #tea addict

[emmasternerradley]

Have any of you read The Cloisters by Katy Hays? I started it during lunch today and I was hooked!

#the cloisters #katy hays #books #booklr #bookblr

[estherdedlock]

It’s been a while since I did a book review, so here goes: Katy Hays’ The Cloisters. This latest entry in would-be successors to The Secret History is a dark academia murder mystery set at The Cloisters, a real museum in New York City dedicated to medieval art.

I can’t separate this book from my feelings about the real Cloisters, which has always been a very special place to me, with great personal and even spiritual meaning. The book reduces this majestic setting to the backdrop of tawdry and highly implausible intrigue that unfolds between Ann Stilwell, (a brilliant grad student from the sticks of Washington state who lands an internship in the research department), and three of her co-workers: Rachel Mondray (gorgeous, rich), Patrick Roland (handsome, rich), and Leo the gardener (bad boy, poor).

There’s a lot going on here: Ann discovers and decodes an ancient deck of tarot cards that backs up some important research of Patrick’s. Rachel conspires with Ann to keep this from Patrick so they can claim the discovery as their own. At the same time, Ann is being lured into the mysticism of tarot and its divination powers -- something Patrick was also obsessed with. She’s also being drawn into Rachel’s luxurious heiress lifestyle. Patrick and Rachel are having sex. Ann and Leo are having sex. Rachel and Leo were having sex. Leo is stealing minor artifacts from the museum and fencing them through a disreputable antiques dealer. Rachel may have murdered her college roommate...and her parents. Patrick is doing ritualistic tarot card readings at the museum at night. Ann has some kind of dark secret in her past, connected to her father’s death. Then they all take some hallucinatory herbs (supplied by Leo from the Cloisters’ garden) and Patrick dies from an apparent overdose. The police immediately and unbelievably label it murder, and then proceed to investigate it as no real cops (I hope) ever would---jumping to conclusions, not following up on glaringly suspicious behavior, etc.

All of this is piled on so fast and furious that there’s no time to develop the kind of haunting atmosphere and tangled relationships that this story cries out for. The book is just too short. Katy Hays had a good idea and some genuinely interesting twists, but it’s all so rushed that you’re left feeling nothing. There’s no sense of mystery, just a lot of foreboding, laid on thick. There’s sex, but no sensuality. The narrator, Ann, is so flat that she wanders through the story with almost no reaction to anything. I think she’s supposed to be a classic unreliable narrator, but she’s our gatekeeper for this story and it’s a problem that she is so closed-off and devoid of emotion.

There’s some gross stuff in here too: Leo’s conduct towards Ann is textbook sexual harassment that gets hand-waved because he’s hot and Ann is attracted to him. He continues to be an awful creep throughout the book. Frankly, no reputable workplace, especially not a world-renowned museum, would tolerate the behavior these characters indulge in on the job. I suffered a lot of second-hand embarrassment for everyone at the real Cloisters for having their workplace and their work parodied by this wildly fictitious potboiler of a story. And it kind of depresses me to think of tourists visiting such a beloved place just because it’s the setting for this goofy book. I wish that Hays had fictionalized The Cloisters the way Donna Tartt fictionalized Bennington into Hampden. I’m just going to have to purge the memory of this novel before I visit the place again, because it’s just too...bleh. No.

It’s a quick read if you want something for the beach or a long flight, but it’s ultimately disappointing and a little bit off-putting.

#katy hays #the cloisters #dark academia #the secret history

[annafromuni]

A New View into Dark Academia with The Cloisters

The Cloisters by Katy Hays dips into a new side of dark academia for me, one which has spurred a wave of curiosity from deep within, and that is art history. Art history is one of those subject that I wanted to take at school but my subject choices didn’t align right for that to happen so getting that art history immersion through Ann (just one letter off!) and this mesmerising read was truly a…

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#the cloisters #katy hays #met cloisters #the met cloisters #the cloisters musuem #dark academia #occult studies #tarot studies #art history studies #gothic thriller #mystery thriller #dark academia books #dark academia reads #adult fiction #book review

[dramyhsturgis]

The Fox & Wit edition of The Cloisters by Katy Hays is beautiful!

#fox & wit #dark academia #gothic #the cloisters #katy hays

[therobishow]

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

#dark acamedia #literature #books #the secret history #the maidens #donna tartt #alex michaelides #babel or the necessity of violence #rf kuang #the cloisters #katy hays

[florriescreamlagoon]

They contained divination practices known in the ancient world, everything from cleromancy, or the casting of lots, to pyromancy. Some terms on the list, like augury, I only knew as a word used to describe something that portended or foreshadowed. I would learn, however, that the original definition of augury was the practice of using bird formations—flocks and migrations—to tell the future.

Katy Hays, The Cloisters

#Katy hays

[oldshrewsburyian]

I’m about halfway through Katy Hays’ The Cloisters and I’m so annoyed by its treatment of academia/academics. Currently, I’m most annoyed by the plot point that claims professors "thought nothing of throwing out material they had already incorporated into their research.”

...Before I checked her author bio, I immediately assumed that Hays had never met an academic or peeked inside an academic’s office. One does not simply throw away material! Okay, I culled my grad school folders full of offprints, but they still take up a shelf. And throwing away material central to one’s research topic?!? Never.

Maybe this seems nitpicky, but I often feel as though books of this kind, though belonging to a subgenre allegedly celebrating such things, have contempt for the substance of what it is that scholars do and how they (we) do it. And this irritates me, not least because I don’t understand why.

#the protagonist somehow picked up multiple languages at her tiny liberal arts college but has not even studied abroad? #make it make SENSE #i managed to have 3 solid languages by the time i graduated from a similar no-name school #but latin AND greek? and medieval vernaculars before she's even started grad school? come on #put the academia in dark academia challenge #katy hays #the cloisters #currently reading

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Cloisters | Author: Katy Hays | Publisher: Atria Books (2022)

#books #The Cloisters #Katy Hays

[pensivegladiola]

The Cloisters by Katy Hays

#books #literature #book recommendations #quotes #literature quotes #women authors #female authors #dark academia #dark acadamia quotes #the cloisters #katy hays #books about art #books about museums #museums #novels #fiction #tarot #tarot cards

[yoongivenn]

The Cloisters - Katy Hays

The Cloisters – Katy Hays

I absolutely loved this book. This is one of the rare cases where a comparison (y title meets z title in this bla bla bla) is actually true. This was sold as The Secret History meets Ninth House, and boy did it deliver. We meet Ann a recent college graduate inbound for a summer internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but as fate would have it, she end up at The Cloisters, gothic museum…

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#5 estrelas #arc #atria books #dark academia #favorite #favoritos #katy hays #livros #netgalley #resenhas #reviews #simon & schuster #the cloisters

[crabs-with-sticks]

So I'm reading The Cloisters by Katy Hays, and I knew it was dark academia going in but hooo boy I did not expect it to be this accurate. And I'm only like 1/5 of the way through.

The elitism; always feeling like you're not enough, trying to replicate the people you see as 'better' than you.

Feeling like you need to become a certain 'type' of person to belong

The amount of reverence given to your 'academic superiors'

The instability of academia- having opportunities taken away with no warning

The in-group out-group social structures where everybody has their own little niches and the nervousness of being outside those and the difficulty of getting in

The exploitation of passion and love of learning for the goals of professors and institutions

Like damn. The book is really good but it is stressing me out.

#the cloisters #katy hays #jay rambles #books #fantasy books #dark academia