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The fan service is fan service-ing and I'm here for it

I'm honestly not sure if these stories are bizarre and creative or just plain creepy

(I just found Miranda July's Instagram and she is EVERYTHING I imagined based on these stories and narration of this audiobook)

Less than a hundred pages left. I honestly just want this book to end lol.

Enjoying this book so much! It was such a random find and it's turning out to be a strong contender for my favorite book of the year 👀

I quite literally cannot stop reading this

It's fascinating that Kelly Bishop started out as a ballet dancer! Been enjoying listening to her narrate this book 🫶🏼

I've finally reached the part where this book is a page-turner. Took Virginia Woolf long enough to get to the point 😬

Her take on Jane Austen is BRILLIANT. And honestly, heartbreaking at the same time. "If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her."

"...Christianity formed my deepest instincts: it gave me a leftist worldview, an obsession with everyday morality, an understanding of having been born in a compromised situation, and a need to continually investigate my own ideas about what it means to be good."

Never thought I'd be able to relate to a former rich-white-Houston-megachurch member, but here we are

Going through this book one essay at a time. I'm only on the third one. I find myself needing to pause and process what I've just read each time I finish an essay.

My favorite so far is still the first one (The I in the Internet), but this third one (Always be Optimizing) where she talks about her insights on mainstream feminism was so thought-provoking.

Guess I'll never look at activewear the same way again.

"We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living."

"The dawn came quickly now, a wash, a glow, a lightness, and then an explosion of fire as the sun arose out of the Gulf."

What a beautiful line 😭

"repetition, not perfection"

“And sometimes when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is like a computer crashing and I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan, which is like pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting so that I can remember what I am doing and where I am meant to be going.”

"And it feels so great finally to dive into the water; maybe you splash around and flail for a while, but at least you're in. Then you start doing whatever stroke you can remember how to do, and you get this scared feeling inside you—of how hard it is and how far there is to go—but still you're in, and you're a float, and you're moving."

"The dawn came quickly now, a wash, a glow, a lightness, and then an explosion of fire as the sun arose out of the Gulf."

What a description.

Happy to be finally doing a long-overdue reread of my favorite book 😌 I've also started running consistently this year! 🏃🏻‍♀️🏃🏻‍♀️🏃🏻‍♀️

Love how Rilke describes love on this page: "two solitudes protecting, defining, and welcoming one another."

I did not exactly plan on reading this book tonight. I just needed a debriefer after reading The Picture of Dorian Gray 😩

Left my copy of this book at my lola's house so I'm here reading it on my Kindle instead 😅 but, man, I'm starting to lose interest. It's sad. I really wanted to love this book.

"She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual." 🥺

Reading this with an audiobook (my first audiobook EVER). I'm only on Chapter 2 right now but I can already say that Russell Tovey's narration is impeccable! I'm having fun listening to him and reading along. 😌

"...the chill gripped my ankles with a mortal ache."

Not me falling in love with Constantin

So far, I've been really liking this book and how easy it is to follow the narration. But MY, OH MY, this book is a bit racist! Whenever Sylvia Plath had to paint a picture of something ugly, she replaced actual adjectives with descriptions of POCs/foreign countries and does so VERY CASUALLY. Just shows how aged this book is.

Gotta constantly remind myself that this was published almost six decades ago.

Doing a bit of reading before 2020 ends (and also dropping by to say that the essay "Transcience"—which talks about the ways people let go of things in life—was so nice and truthful AND TIMELY, since the year is almost ending 😌🤧)

The writing can get tedious at some parts, but when I read it more thoughtfully, the message underneath the writing style gets across anyway, and I guess that's what matters.

I just wish some of the essays had richer descriptions that could really engage the senses.

Jessica Zafra's humor, I swear, is A+++. Jessica rules the universe!