I’ve been thinking this as well! I’m sure there are plenty of other people still in Exeter, judging by the fact that a lot of students are still in my uni town. I obvs spend time with my flatmates, but I also see other friends as well. Like Ruby, I’m naturally introverted and don’t like spending time with large groups of people or getting drunk every night, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have multiple friends. It really looks like Blakeney is Ruby’s only friend - I haven’t even seen mention of their other friend (Sascha?) for ages. I hope it’s what Blakeney wants as well, and that she isn’t being pressured into only spending time with Ruby. Imagine Ruby being the only person you hung out with…
Yup, it was one of the first things we were all told at my uni - don’t use a thesaurus to make yourself sound more intelligent, because you will invariably fail. It blows my mind that she’s getting the grades she does. Either Exeter is a far worse uni than I thought, or her essays are infinitely better than anything she lets the public see.
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This is the review btw. Special shout outs to “trailing descriptions of things”, and “absorbs himself in his him intellectual pursuits”.
Totally agree. She acts like she’s incredibly well read but her ratio of children’s to adult literature must be terrible. The Death of Francis Bacon makes me chuckle - firstly it took me like 45 minutes to read, secondly if anyone knows anything about Francis Bacon (the painter not the Renaissance dude), they’ll know that drugs and sex make up a large part of his work. The book is…not as good as Porter’s other work I don’t think, but honestly I can see her marking it down just because in some ways it’s pretty filthy. It’s not a portrait of an artist who waltzes around being incredibly ~aesthetic~ all the time, it’s about one who had issues with drugs and booze, and died a lonely, undignified death. The book has a few drug and sex heavy passages, there’s no way she would have liked it. She’ll have read it because she read his previous book, Lanny, which is fantastic. It also has a child protagonist, who sees the world in an innocent, typically childlike manner. I wonder why she liked it? I assume she was disappointed when she discovered that Porter isn’t a child himself, and had the audacity to write about silly unimportant things that adults do, instead of sticking to children with deeply romanticised outlooks on life.