Book Reviews – February 2019 – “It is the product of an unimaginative girl, preoccupied with herself, and continually splashing about in the shallow waters of her own narrow psyche.”

Three to get married by Fulton J. Sheen

A play about three daughters getting married. A comedy, I think. Their father is a priest and marries them off quickly and rather absurdly. 

I don’t read many plays. This one doesn’t convince me to try more.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara

Well-written, but chilling book about a serial killer prolific decades ago. The author was so stressed writing it that she died. Her book was published in 2016, the killer still not caught. In 2018, using DNA evidence, the police finally arrested him. He wasn’t on anybody’s radar or list of suspects.

I don’t know why I read this book and subsequently read all the new details on Wikipedia. I wish I hadn’t. The world is scary.

But, hey, if you upload your DNA here, we can catch some more bad guys. This is the interesting stuff. It’s possible to narrow down a suspect by creating a family tree from a fourth or fifth cousin who uploads her DNA. Then the police take something from the suspect(s) garbage can(s) and match it to the DNA from the crime scene. 100% proof positive.

If I were a killer, I’d be nervous. 

If you see me and I’m nervous, it’s for different reasons.

American Vampire Volumes 1-4 by Scott Snyder and Stephen King, illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque

I joined a comic book club and this was the selection. This is a comic book about vampires, specifically the vampire species in the United States. I’m not really a comic book person. The visuals drive the story, but my brain seeks out words, so I subsequently skip over the panels with no words and probably miss a lot.

Plus, I don’t care about vampires. 

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath compiled by Karen V. Kukil

Sylvia is a better writer than most, scribbling in her diary at 18. She’s certainly better than even my polished work at twice her age. I wrote down so many quotes that I liked.

God knows. Maybe he doesn’t. If he lives in my head or under my left ventricle, maybe he’s too uncomfortable to know much of anything.

I had a hard time picking out the best bits to showcase her writing ability.

I want to kill myself to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going – and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will.

She didn’t expect anyone to read these journals. This is her freehand. 

to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentlemen’s agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment.

One more.

It is the product of an unimaginative girl, preoccupied with herself, and continually splashing about in the shallow waters of her own narrow psyche.

She’s a brilliant writer, but I stopped reading about 400 pages in (out of 700+). There wasn’t enough paragraph spacing and too many walls of text.

It feels wrong criticizing someone’s diary.  

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown

Biography of the U.S. Men’s Rowing team that went to Germany and raced against the German team when Hitler was in charge. The boys in the boat (the Americans) win. 

Maybe it’s because I don’t care about rowing, but this book annoyed me. It wasn’t interesting enough to recommend, but it wasn’t boring enough to put me to sleep. I finished it because I was on a plane. I should have watched Ocean’s 8, instead.

But it gets really good reviews, so my opinion is the outlier.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

More Sylvia Plath. I’ve read this book before and I’m surprised by how much of it I remembered accurately.  

I particularly remembered her fig tree.

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.”

The title is so perfect. The bell jar is the depression and how she sees the world through her jerk brain.

How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere–the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?

You don’t.

Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness by Epictetus, a new interpretation by Sharon Lebell

A tiny book based on the teachings of a stoic from back in the day. I get what everyone is saying — on an intellectual level, anyway — but it’s so hard to put into practice.

Nothing can truly be taken from us. There is nothing to lose. Inner peace begins when we stop saying of things, “I have lost it” and instead say, “It has been returned to where it came from…..The most important thing it to take great care with what you have while the world lets you have it.

This ancient stoic’s name is hard to say. Eh-pick-tee-tis. Maybe that’s why his student Marcus is more famous. His name is easier to say.