A literary love story (with added mermaids)

There's nothing better than  a  gorgeous blog post like this one to cheer up a grim and grey Monday morning.  It's sort of about Donna Tartt's The Secret History but is mainly about so much more than that.  It's very romantic.  The blog post, I mean; not The Secret History.

The Secret History is still a good read though. Set in an exclusive college, it starts with the death of a character.  The story then goes back in time; the first half of the book details events leading up to the death and the second half explores the consequences.

Which reminds me: I've just finished Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray, which is also a good read.  It's set in an exclusive boys' boarding school, and starts with the death of a character. The story then goes back in time; the first half of the book details events leading up to the death and the second half...... yep, you've got it.  As a narrative structure, it clearly works.

Skippy Dies is great; it's quite dark but very funny in places, and you can almost smell the adolescent boys as they fly off the page.  Here are some of them (Ruprecht Van Doren included) talking about mermaids:

'Regarding the whole mermaids issue, being amphibious would certainly make it easier to have sex with them,' Mario says.
'Mermaids don't have beavers, you clown. Even if they were amphibious you couldn't have sex with them,' snaps Dennis.
'What's the point of mermaids if you can't have sex with them?'
'Well, I suppose the key thing to remember is that mermaids are imaginary,' Ruprecht notes.  'Although interestingly, some marine biologists speculate that the legend may have arisen from large aquatic mammals of the sirenian class like dugongs and manatees, which have fish-like bodies but human-like breasts, and nurse their pups on the water's surface.'
'Von Blowjob, find a dictionary and look up "interesting".'
'What I don't understand,' Geoff says, 'is why did the first fish, like the one who started land animals, suddenly decide one day to just leave the sea?  Like, to leave everything he knew, to go flopping around on a land where no one had even evolved yet for him to talk to?' He shakes his head.  'He was a brave fish, definitely, and we owe him a lot for starting life on land and everything? But I think he must have been very depressed.'