Books... and More Books

I think my period of deadness is almost over, which is good because, for all of the many benefits, zombies don't write blog posts very well.

I suppose this means I fail at Blog365, but I actually made it further than I expected, so I'll go with the feeling of triumph at making it through over a month. Hey, it's better than I did last November!

I've been reading the biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame, lately and that is not a book to read when you're feeling low down and blue, I've determined. Not when you're feeling exceptionally happy, either. So, you have to be sort of fair to middling to read it. It's seriously limiting my times when I can read this book. In any case, she certainly had a life! It wasn't even a bad life, all things considered, if she had been less depressive and competitive.

I find myself incredibly mad at Ted Hughes now, however. Not because of himself or his relationship with Sylvia or anything, but because he burned the journals she wrote during the last years of her life. Burned them! The first two-thirds of the book is alive with her prose and turn of phrase and then you reach within two years of her death and everything's guesswork from there on out. Argh.

Her poetry is much clearer now, the book explains a lot of the symbols that cloud her verse because they mostly relate to events that happened in her life; her work is very autobiographical.

Anyway, if you've hung on this long, you should definitely read the book. Oh, and also you should read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I've been enjoying it for my Russian lit class and it is a riot! The devil comes to Moscow for a visit and, well naturally, all hell breaks loose. Apparently, it's very popular in Russia even today. With good reason! It almost makes up for the fact that the next book on the reading list looks as though it could substitute in for a brick in a pinch. Seriously, I'm afraid of it. I might slip a disc trying to heft it up to read it.