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The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, Deborah Lutz.

(The Woodlanders is on hold until further notice -- I like it but I'm not in a fiction mood).

Winter by Ali Smith

"things that make white people uncomfortable"

A book

Well reviewed and reviewer compares her writing to Shakespeare based on the use of language, puns, etc.

High praise indeed. I'll have to try to find a copy.

Agatha Christie "And Then There Were None"

All Things Remembered (Goldie autobiography)

Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny - Mark Stavish

I finished The Brontë Cabinet which was extraordinary, apart from Chapter 2 which was disjointed and off-topic.

Onward to:
Charlotte Brontë: Selected Letters. Ed. Margaret Smith. Oxford World's Classics: Oxford University Press, 2010.

I am currently reading "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath for the sixth time-- I read the book once every year...

I am also reading an anthology of Native American Women's short stories and traditional tales called "The Spider Woman's Granddaughters", edited by Paula Gunn Allen. This is for my Native American Women's Literature Class...

I am also reading Mary Oliver more frequently as she passed away the Thursday before this past Thursday...

I really got into Sylvia Plath for a while....

Her father was a beekeeper. They lived near Logan Airport----in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

I'm surprised to learn that six-year-olds read The Bell Jar.

Milkman by Anna Burns.

It's interesting how much her book is resonating with me.

I ought to be reading To Be A Cat by Matt Haig but it's gone missing.

No, her father was an entemologist and his specialty was honeybees. He was a professor-- "You are beside the blackboard, Daddy, in the picture I have of you"-- at a university in Boston. And yes, Sylvia was born in Jamaica Plains, Massachussetts, but she grew up in Wellesley. However, many people do just assume that Sylvia's father was a beekeeper as one of her poems, "The Beekeeper's Daughter" was written in 1959 while she was enrolled in Robert Lowell's writing class. Her later bee poems (poems like "The Wintering", "The Bee Box", and "Stings") also drive from the central inspirational apparatus that seemed to link Sylvia's fascination with the natural world-- however, she often uses her later bee poems to confront social issues-- one critic suggests that "The Bee Box" was Sylvia's attempt to confront her own whiteness, to recognize her power and her infinite vulnerability, of this attempt to consolidate power to the powerless that ultimately proved self-sacrificial-- or to offer a Gilman-like utopia of a world free of men as in "The Wintering"... So yes, in Sylvia's imagination, she recreated her father in the positive "colossus" of a beekeeper and then in his overpowering godhood-- the father she lost before she could fully love, that she had tried to recreate in other men-- as a Nazi, which is seen in "Daddy"...

If you have any more questions about Sylvia, I would love to provide the answer... I did, however, have to look up exactly when "The Beekeeper's Daughter" was written...

A really wonderful blog, maintained by the man who recently collected her letters into two volumes-- starting in 1940 with the only letter adressed to her father--- and then, I have not ordered the second volume yet so I do not know how the letters close... I think it is interesting though that the very first uncovered letter would be to her father, written when she was 8, I think... I do not have the book beside me, but I am pretty sure it was written in the spring of 1940 as her father passed in the Fall of this year shortly after her ninth birthday from complication after a leg amputation due to the initial complications of diabetes...

The website is called: "A Celebration this is!"
https://sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.com/se ... s+Daughter

No, I am twenty two... I read the book once every year and I have been reading the book since I was sixteen. It was the first book I read, assigned by my Junior Honors English class, after the first time I got out of the mental hospital... And since then, she has been a constant comfort for me... Sixteen to Twenty Two would make six years... February 2013 to February 2019 would make six years... I was not six years old... At six, I was reading "The Animal Ark" book series or "Junie B. Jones."

Also, my friend said that you are probably joking because of the winky face.

Yes, I was joking. Also, not to be overly pedantic ... but 16 - 22 (or 2013 - 2019) would make seven years.