Bookshelf · Classic LitPreview

Esther Greenwood.

The Bell Jar · 1963

A summer in New York, a stack of borrowed books, a reading list shaped by a mind cracking open. Esther reads voraciously and never quite peacefully.

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart."

3 booksCurated · cited · cross-referenced

The shelf, decoded

Why this list.

Esther reads. She reads in the bathtub, on subways, between dates with men she does not like. The books name themselves throughout the novel — Joyce, Plath’s own poetry, the Stoics.

The reading list

3 books for Esther.

No. 01On screen
Finnegans Wake
James Joyce
Esther is supposed to be writing her thesis on it. She is not writing.
CitationNovel, Chapter 9
No. 02Creator cited
Ariel
Sylvia Plath
Author meta-canon. The poems Plath was writing as she wrote The Bell Jar.
CitationAuthor canon
No. 03Character fit
Letters from a Stoic
Seneca
The book Esther reaches for when she stops sleeping.
CitationCharacter-fit

Closing note

Read with the window open.

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Cover of Stoddard’s Lectures by John L. Stoddard

Cover of The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Cover of This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A library full of uncut pages. Gatsby owns the books he was never given the time — or class — to read. The list is a story of longing.

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The Catcher in the RyeSoon

Holden Caulfield

Cover of Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

Cover of The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Phonies on every shelf, but a few authors get a pass. Holden actually reads — Fitzgerald, Hardy, Isak Dinesen — between the cigarettes and the contempt.

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Pride and PrejudiceSoon

Elizabeth Bennet

Cover of The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

Cover of Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women by James Fordyce

The original quick-witted reader. Lizzie’s library: novels her mother disapproves of, conduct manuals she ignores, and the letters that change everything.

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