50 books to read before you die discussion

Our group read for Q1 of 2021 (Jan, Feb, Mar) from the 50 books list is The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

In the next couple of weeks I'll come back with some discussion prompts and resource links but feel free to take the discussion in any direction you wish. Just keep in mind when you're discussing specific plot points to let people know what part you're at and use the spoiler tag to keep the discussion friendly for everyone, wherever they're at in the book.

eg. (without the spaces)
I'm up to Chapter 3 and < spoiler > example text here < / spoiler >

Here are some discussion prompts - you can totally ignore these, but they may spark inspiration...

- Have you ever read The Bell Jar before? If so, how did this experience differ from the first time?
- What were your expectations for this book?
- What scene impacted you most?
- What was your least favourite part?
- Favourite lines or quotes?
- What did you think of the writing style?
- Did this remind you of any other books?
- Could you relate to Esther?
- How much do you know about Sylvia Plath's life and did that impact how you read The Bell Jar?
- What did you think of the novel's treatment of mental illness?
- Do you think the feminist elements in this book are still relevant today, almost 60 years after it was first published?

So, I finished reading The Bell Jar last night. I’ve been reading reviews and some people have no empathy for Esther which I cannot understand. I found the book more haunting in a way because there wasn’t an especially traumatic event or hard situation that triggered her breakdown. Depression is an illness, it can affect anyone. I hardly know anything about Sylvia Plath’s life and haven’t read any of her poetry, but the fact she died by suicide not that long after writing this book adds another layer. The way she writes the stifling, tainting lens of mental illness shows that she lived it.

This book certainly has an element of racism and white feminism that needs to be addressed. I found this article interesting, it talks about all the problematic imagery I noticed plus some I didn't - https://www.wweek.com/arts/books/2017...
Esther’s view of queer people in her life also made me uncomfortable. "You make me puke, if you want to know." She is an unreliable and unlikeable main character, but that doesn't take away from her struggles. In fact her struggles are directly affecting how she views the world; her suspicion, distrust & disgust. Like I said, tainting.

Something I did like was the imagery within Plath's writing. Here are some lines I loved: (view spoiler)[
“The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.” (pg 17)
“I felt like a racehorse in a world without race-tracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone." (pg 73)
"Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits. I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telegraph poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three ... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth." (pg 118)
"The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom. I thought seven storeys must be a safe distance." (pg 131)
"'We'll take up where we left off, Esther,' she said, with her sweet, martyr's smile. 'We'll act as if all this was a bad dream.' A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything." (pg 227)
"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am." (pg 233) (hide spoiler)]

I enjoyed reading both Esther's outright, and more subtle, rejection of the expectations she and others place on herself and how that manifested as confusion and disgust. Like her opinion on pregnancy; at one point she describes a woman's "protruding stomach" as "grotesque". One scene that stands out to me is from chapter two when (view spoiler)[ Esther is in the bath. She talks about remembering the ceilings over every bathtub she's been in, and that she feels about a hot bath "the way those religious people feel about holy water." (hide spoiler)]. Parts of The Bell Jar were darkly funny, that surprised me, (view spoiler)[like when Buddy is asking if there's something in him that drives woman crazy (hide spoiler)].

I didn't love this book, and it's definitely not one I would feel comfortably recommending to anyone as it could trigger or intensify dark thoughts (plus you know, the racism). I did like that it acknowledged a side of life we tend to ignore. I couldn't tell you about the history of mental illness in literature but I imagine this book was revolutionary in the 1960s, it still feels bold today.