Jenny's Bookshelf: DNF- The Bell Jar

I DNF'd a book for the first time in a long time. For anyone unsure DNF means did not finish. Since reinvigorating my love of reading a book has got the better of me and I have made the decision to love it and leave it.

The book in question, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. This is one of those books I have walked past in Waterstones a hundred times thinking. That's one of those books everyone says you should read. A famous piece of feminist literature about a woman working in journalism trying to find her purpose in life. Sounds like my kind of book.

One day I thought, today's the day I pick it up. So I did and it was set to be my first book of 2024. Its a very short book I thought it would make a good appetizer for the year.

I was mistaken.

It was very slow to get going, the writing style was intriguing and at first I was keen to find out where it was going. I was pleased when I reached the famous fig tree analogy and I felt even more certain that this was the book for me.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

However, it is now almost March and I have not finisned a 250 page book. 2022 Jenny would say that was par for the course. 2023 me would struggle to understand.

I found myself progressing from less inclined to reach for my book, continuing to pack it in my bag on the off chance I would get stuck into it on the bus or train. To actively avoiding picking it up and staring longingly at the stack of books waiting to be read after this one.

I was packing my bag one morning for work when the thought of reading it on the train into the office made me sad. This is not why I read books, what am I trying to prove? And who am I trying to prove it to?

It was just too depressing, with very little sign of hope redemption or resolution. Maybe it is my fault for expecting any of those three things from a novel written by a women who famously died by putting her head in the oven.

Who knows maybe one day I will come back to it and appreciate it for what it is. But for now I am leaving it stranded on page 156 and moving onto the next book in the stack.