Sylvia Plath and authors I've not read
Last week I was on holiday near where Sylvia Plath was buried and the house was full of Sylvia Plath books. Poems, biographies, letters, The Bell Jar. There was a lot of Brontë, also nearby.
And, you know, I'd never read any Sylvia Plath. Which is such a strange omission.
Obviously, in the grand scheme of authors, I've not read the vast majority. None of us can. I'll give most things a go but no one looks at me my physical form, my life, or my reading history, and says "Wow, I can't believe you've never read Colleen Hoover." (No shade to Colleen Hoover, the first of many such people who wisped through my mind.)
Sylvia Plath though, Sylvia Plath looks right up my street.
There's tonnes but here's a couple, more off the top of my head, with wide and obvious and classic catalogues:
- Salman Rushdie
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Iain Banks
And one author I'm very proud of not having read more than a page of? JK Rowling. In 2003 to see what all the fuss was about I cracked open a Harry Potter, read the first page, thought 'This is not a nice person', and put it down. For a long time I had to downplay it to people who couldn't believe I hadn't read Harry Potter - now it's a massive flex.
Thanks to my proximity to the grave, I have now read The Bell Jar and Ariel. I had to put The Bell Jar down after a couple of outmoded forms of language on ethnicities and that gets unpleasant briefly later on but overall it was funnier than I had imagined and I'm glad I've now finally read some Sylvia Plath and would do so again.