I hated almost everything about this book.

There are 2 good quotes but so much racism, fatphobia and I apparently DNFed it before the homophobia started. I don't get the hype at all.

It made it to my worst books of 2024: https://youtu.be/8-WrZCY8qfo?si=GOv_n...

This is, by far, the most disappointed I’ve ever been when it came to a book.Not just with the book itself, but with how many people decided to ignore the racism taking place in it.I’ve had this novel praised to me so many times that I idolized it for years before I even bought it. I was so scared that I wouldn’t like it that I kept waiting to be in “the right mind-set” before I decided to finally pick it up.About a quarter into the book I had already encountered not one, but 3 racist comments m...

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”It had been a number of years since I last read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. What I’d remembered most was how well Plath had established the mood for this story by weaving the electrocutions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg with the mental breakdown of her heroine, Esther Greenwood. But the story is definitely about Esther, her ambition, and her own feelings of inadequacy, even though (viewed from the...

i did not know that if you're mentally ill you're allowed to be mean and annoying. i wish i had done things differently.i do get why this is a classic. some reasons it is, in order of niceness to not niceness: -it is very beautifully written-that fig paragraph is probably one of the best passages on what it is to be a mentally ill young woman ever brought into this world-it is, in many ways, ahead of its time-sylvia plath has the kind of compelling story that would have sealed her canonical fate...

Review Are those with depression and cultural icons to be excused moral standards? I had a PM slagging me off completely about this review. Essentially it came down to how dare I criticise a feminist cultural icon who suffered from mental illness and accuse her of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. And if she really was why has no one else pointed it out? That I am biased as fuck etc. Actually others have pointed it out. That was the point of my review, separating the artist from their work. ...

I feel like I owe Sylvia Plath an apology. This is a book I actively avoided for years because so many people (namely female classmates who wanted to be perceived as painfully different or terminally misunderstood or on the verge of absolutely losing their teenage shit) lauded the virtues of this book and how it, like, so totally spoke to them in places they didn't even know they had ears. My own overly judgmental high-school self could not accept even the remote possibility of actual merit lurk...

There is this scene in Chapter 10 of The Bell Jar where Esther Greenwood decides to write a novel. "My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing." I cannot help wondering, is that what Sylvia Plath thought when she wrote The Bell Jar? Did she, like Esther, sit on a breezeway in an old nightgown waiting for something to happen? Is that why she chose the name E...

I've never shied away from depressing material, but there's a difference between the tone serving the story, and a relentlessly depressing work that goes entirely nowhere. I know it can be viewed as a glimpse into Plath's mind, but I would rather do a lot of things, some quite painful, than read this again. It hurt to get through it, and I think it's self-indulgent and serves no real artistic purpose. Which is truly a shame, as I love a lot of Plath's poetry.

There are many who have read The Bell Jar and absolutely loved it. I am gladly considering myself one of them. I was a little caught of guard when I read a few reviews of The Bell Jar comparing it to The Catcher in the Rye stating how it's the female version of it. I liked Catcher but I know there are many people who didn't and upon hearing that may be similar to Catcher not have the desire to read it. I assure you, The Bell Jar is a book all on it's own and should not be compared to any other b...

there once was a girl from the bay state
who tried to read finnegan's wake.
it made her so ill,
she took loads of pills.
james joyce has that knack to frustrate.

come to my blog!