---Camille Scaysbrook <verona_beach@geocities.com> wrote: > > Mine would have to be, in no real order (it's like saying which order you > like you children in). I've taken `book' here to mean anything that can be > written on paper and clamped between two covers : > > 1) The Catcher in the Rye - who else ??? > > 2) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov > > 3) `A Dream Within A Dream' - Edgar Allan Poe (poem) > > 4) The Complete Works of Shakespeare > > 5) `14 Stories' - Heinrich Boll > > These are the books I'd probably pick up on the way out of any given > burning building (: > > By the way, what do you think of `The Bell Jar'. I read it because I'd > heard it called `the female equivalent of `The Catcher in the Rye' so many > times, but I must confess I never made it all the way through - I thought > it was suprisingly badly written; a classic example of the wrong way to > utilise your own experiences in your artmaking (i.e. just presenting > taxidermies of them in a nicer frame). > > Camille > verona_beach@geocities.com > @ THE ARTS HOLE > www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442 > > > i've read it. it provides some insight into the poems in ariel. and others. like "a smile fell in the grass" which you will only really understand after the bell jar and the line about losing it in mathmatics which becomes multi-explanitory. because of the mathmatician named Paul and her need to excel in school. i confess though the school part i hadn't thought of until now. because it probably wasn't intended. although ariel and it's poems are perfectly affecting without the extra help. it is not the female version of the catcher in the rye. i don't think the female version would be any different other than Holden would be Jane maybe and Jane would be Holden. if it even needs to go as far as changing the names. there's a haunting line (or at least one that's haunting me at the moment) which i think is from the bell jar. something like "don't ever commit suicide, something good always happens" which i know very well is not the line and i'm pretty sure (although i don't know where i would have read one) it's from a letter to her mother about a girl who was talking with sylvia and then got a date. the girl said the line in sylvia's version. paul. _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com