1. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
If you follow me on Twitter you'll know that I tweet about this book annoyingly a lot. I first found out about this book in 2014 after watching 10 things I Hate About Youand witnessing Kat reading the Bell Jar. The next day I picked it up from the library and fast forward 24 months and it's become one of my favourite books of all time.
This book is a sort of autobiography for Sylvia Plath. Full of dark humour, wit and feministic views, it tells the tale of a summer writing in New York and then coping with life after that. Without spoiling it, ultimately Plath writes about her descent of depression and her deep traumatic battles with suicide, When I first started reading the book I was uneasy, feeling it was an extremely pretentious novel. Her descriptions were extremely detailed, often using words that one rarely hears spoken or even read. I went into the novel knowing from my Leaving Cert course that Plath was a poet and felt that at first the book was just another form of her poetry. But that only remained within the first two pages, because after that I became absorbed. Sometimes, once in a long while, a book comes around, with words so cogitative that they bounce off the pages and hit me with pangs of echoing familiarity.
And that, The Bell Jar does. Numerous times. And it's scary that I'm relating to a potential depressional and suicidal victim.
If it's one book you want to read after taking into account this list, it should be this one.
You can purchase this book here
