i took this out of the library because Middlesex wasn’t in—though i have been curious about this novel since seeing Sophia Coppola’s movie version five years ago, even if i wasn’t a big fan of the film.

i think i would have appreciated this much more if i’d read it when i was younger. now i feel too far from high school to fall into this world. the odd choral narration of the neighborhood boys imparts a further distance.

though i also had a bad headcold while reading it (all in one day), so that could have had something to do with it too.

i read this too long ago.

while i was reading Wintering, i had a few conversations about books about young women in mental institutions. i think i read The Bell Jar once, but i read this book a few times, drawn to the non-linear narrative with a confessional tone, quirky humor, and heavy intimacy. Kaysen spent almost two years in McLean Hospital in her late teens and wrote this memoir over twenty years later. that distance extracts a lot of the angst and melodrama that might be expected.

related: The Mad Poets Society

i loved this book when i read it several years ago, using it as a first page for the last issue of my zine pink tea (see below); it was a nice counterweight to Catch-22 to read it again now. it’s a very layered look at the history of tea and tea ceremonies, digging deeper than one may expect in such a short work.

… it is less a book than a (sometimes political) pamphlet. Westernization, it suggests, is not all it’s cracked up to be, and in any case the West made only a feeble effort to understand the East but a vigorous effort to misrepresent and destroy it. —review by Kenneth Champeon

you can read the full text online, though there is also a great hardcover edition with a slipcase for those inclined toward that sort of thing—the ISBN for this edition is the one linked. below, an excerpt printed in my zine, pink tea #6.

i’ve been meaning to read this book forever; i remember regularly looking for it in the boston public library and never finding it on the shelf. finally i came upon it in a used bookshop a few months ago. i never expected to take almost a month to finish this book, but apparently war stories tire me out (while reading this, i also tried to watch The Thin Red Line, which i wound up skimming through on fast forward). i also wasn’t expecting the sarcastic humor of recurring jokes featuring endless bouts of circular logic. there are so many characters, i couldn’t keep track of them half of the time.

partway through, the spine of the old paperback cracked, splitting the book roughly in half. i trudged through the last half of the broken-off second half as characters began dying and disappearing. upon finishing, i can see how realistic this account of war probably is: the ridiculous beaurocracy and frustration and injustices. and, as hoped, a few of the chapters near the end brought a deeper insight that gave me some satisfaction in forcing myself to finish this, as well as weak ray of hope.