well I've adopted a very recent policy about this kinda thing but it's more periodical / temporal than permanent. Maybe you could read it at another point in your life but if now is not a good idea then don't.

Actually, I was reading "Schultz", the biography on Charles Schultz, creator of Peanuts. About halfway through, I realized that Mr. Schultz had some serious issues (ego; poor self esteem that he over compensated for with arrogance) that were messing with my idealization of him. But when it got to the point that he was unfaithful to his wife - it hit far too close to home for me, and I had to stop reading. Knowing how much of his private life was being revealed in the comics themselves..sort of clouded my enjoyment of something I've enjoyed as long as I can remember. I skipped to the end of the book, to read about his final years, but there is a good chunk that I chose not to absorb.

You could set it aside and read a biography of her or something that will offer you another angle on it all. The Bell Jar was hard to get through.

If you don't think you're going to handle it well, set it aside. If anything gives me a bad feeling, I just don't read it. There's plenty of great stuff to read that doesn't trip my wires, and feeling good is a big priority for me.

On the other hand, if you feel you have strategies for coping with it and you would get something healing out of going forward,then by all means go for it. I mean there's just no reason to push yourself through something you don't want to read. If it means your head is spending too much time in places you don't want to be, there's no problem just dropping it.

Don't read it if it's making you uncomfortable. Just put it down and move on. As Miko says, there's so much great stuff out there. If you're feeling like you should stop, then stop and don't give it another thought. Listen to that instinct that says "not good for me".

The only book I ever had to stop reading for its effects on me was Ben Okri's, The Famished Road. It was hallucinatory. The prose would slip so seamlessly between real/not real, like slipping behind the thin drape of this world, that it started to bleed into my day-to-day. It was like the book cast some kind of spell. I remember sitting in the optometrist's waiting room, waiting for my mom, and looking around the room, and feeling like the people had morphed into these grotesque figures from the book. This one old man with cloudy grey eyes. Very freaky experience. I was about halfway through the book and had to stop.

I do love Sylvia Plath, and The Bell Jar. But I find others' depression cathartic (I love Bukowski and Hemingway, too.) No worries, though. I'm sure Sylvia would understand.

The way i read bj now is as an account of what it was like for women in the 50s.

Have you ever read a book that you thought might not be a good idea for you to read?

YUP! You bet!

In fact, a few years ago, The Bell Jar was one of them. I was having a hard time, feeling weighty, tired, like just getting through the winter was going to be a heavy load to carry. Something I read made reference to The Bell Jar and I thought "Gosh, I haven't read that for a while, and it's so powerful. I should --- NOPE! Not this winter!"

I know there will be a time when I'll revisit that book, maybe even this month, but there's no sense in putting that weight on my shoulders when I'm already feeling weighted down. For me, that's simple self-care.

I wish I'd stopped reading Ellroy's My Dark Places. I idolised him as a writer and as a person and reading it just felt like this series of blows to my psyche as a woman, as someone who thinks women should be taken seriously. It was so clear, throughout the whole thing, that as much as he loves women (and I think it's a genuine love) it is all so rooted in sex that I couldn't continue my false identification as the fucker (so to speak) because forevermore I know, by virtue of my gender, I am the fucked within his world.

It kinda broke me. And his books. I love his writing but it's uncomfortable to recognise yourself in the women in his books and know that your intellect, your wit, is subsumed by the fact he could fuck you. And that it's a widespread delusion as well, not just him.

But yeah, I walk away from books a lot more now. I refuse to read almost all paranormal romance thanks to rape-tropes.

I know Nancy Pearl says that you shouldn't force yourself to keep reading if a book doesn't do it for you, but 99% of the time I keep going until the bitter end. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell took me something like six years :P

I have several books in hibernation right now, but none for any particular reason. The only book that I actually had to stop reading was Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle. It started in with things about how her mother didn't want their family to associate with people who were "beneath" them, but had her three-year-old daughter boiling her own hot dogs on the stove. (Jeannette, the daughter, thought nothing of it -- it was easy.) It reminded me way too much about my own mother's relationship with ideas of "propriety" that existed completely separately from the rationality of the real world.

I don't think I even made it through the second chapter.

Well, this is much lighter, but in the summer of 1988 I was trying to read Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I had this horrible hot commute on a bus and subway in DC, and everything in that novel seemed SO HOT as well. There was just too much heat everywhere, and I had to give up.

I actually have much more trouble with movies I shouldn't see, rather than books. I can mostly distance myself from what's going on in a book, but a movie plays out right there in your face.

Confederacy of Dunces.

I read The Bell Jar 20 years ago. It didn't resonate much, maybe because Plath's problems were not my problems, yet given my life experiences is also seemed redundant.

The last time I read the Bell Jar, I remember thinking how no one ever mentions how funny it is.
When I was much younger, I always felt obligated to finish books, and we are talking about some sprawling, boring books here. Now, I feel life's too short and right now I have the opposite problem where nothing feels worth the bother of finishing without having some immediately enthralling quality. I'm having the hardest time finding something to read for pleasure, and that's the thing, it should be pleasurable. Unless you absolutely have to read it, put it aside for now. Soon enough, I'm going to have to be back into the world of things that must be read, so I'm trying to enjoy reading just for the sake of reading. Any recommendations are heartily welcomed.

Oh, and I didn't finish Oblivion because I was pretty depressed at the time and didn't feel like reading about it was the best idea. Also, I try to avoid tv with cops, doctors and lawyers, but mostly cops because I am as sick of cops as I am formulaic tv.

I went ahead and finished the book (it's not really all that long of a book). It's touted as such a classic, that I kind of felt I had to (ow, ow, stop twisting my arm!). Miko, I have read a biography (or two) of Plath and that's what drove me to wanting to read her novel.

I was mostly curious if anyone else had had the same reaction to a book as I had not. Sure, I've quit reading books that I've found boring, difficult, etc., I've even read Mary Carr's autobiographies; they really hit close to home, but in a different way from The Bell Jar. But never had a book hit me in my psyche like TBJ did.

Thank you all for your comments. And don't stop posting on my account, it's really interesting to find out which books other people have had problems with.

Good for you-- I teach it sometimes as part of my Literature & Psychology themed AP English class, or, at least I used to. (Unfortunately, I don't have the books at the moment -- I had a class set, but my bum of an Assistant Principal "lost" them when our school moved one side of the building to the other a couple years ago.) The students like it. Her diary's interesting, too. She sounds so young in some of the entries. I do wish she had reached out for help when things got so bad again. I first read Bell Jar in graduate school, in my early thirties, and I remember writing mournfully in a paper, All that talent, but it couldn't save her. I think I was counting on my own writing to save me at the time.

Interestingly, someone at the College Board is rather fond of using Ted Hughes poems as AP Literature exam questions. Good poet, I have to give him that, but lacked his wife's passion.

Absolutely, deborah. And that is a particularly hard book when you are feeling sad.

Many books tear me up, either because people or animals I care about die or are hurt, or because they scare me. I'm finishing Duma Key right now on audio, and it is giving me some really disturbing nightmares.

But -- that's the power of books, too -- that you step into someone else's mind and imagination and feel it as if it were real.

That suicide ideation is an issue for you is something I hope you talk to us about. I am very fond of you, deborah bunny.