And Unabridged Journals, Letters Home, Ariels, Collected Poems, Colossuses, Johnny Panics, biographies… etc etc etc… every Sylvia Plath book, primary and secondary literature you own or read at the moment… you love or hate… all together in one pic or a separate pic for every book, whatever you like… be creative… no self-doubts ;)

One condition… don’t take just a picture of the book(s), be in them too… your face, your eyes, your hands… it’s up to you…

I’m afraid, I’m gonna be really really very busy during the next four weeks, so I won’t be posting here for a while :/

Sure, I could queue some posts, since I’ve got 100 drafts or so, but it’s only half the fun, so I came up with that one…

Take your pic and post it as a photo reply to this post and when I’m back (December 18, 2010), I’m gonna make a contest with a tiny Christmas Giveaway ;)

I think, reading a biography of every one of them is a good start, but I couldn’t figure the “right” Sylvia Plath biography yet. I’ve read Rough Magic by Paul Alexander and I’m currently reading Peter K. Steinberg’s Sylvia Plath as well as Ronald Hayman’s The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. I thought, I liked Rough Magic, but as I started researching and reading more about biographies (like The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath for example), I’m not sure anymore if I can really recommend a certain biography. I need to read more on that topic, but I will do it very soon, because I’m currently working on my thesis, as I mentioned before and I promise to get back to you guys and to review every book I read on the topic of Sylvia Plath, so I can recommend a book with a clear conscience! :)

For sure I CAN recommend Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev’s Lover of Unreason, because it’s the only Assia Wevill biography so far. I also ordered Ted Hughes’s biography The Life of a Poet by Elaine Feinstein, but I can tell you more when I’m through with it. There is another book, I stared reading a while ago by Diane Middlebrook Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath - A Marriage, it seems very informative, but since I didn’t finish it yet, I can’t say too much about it.

In general, I would definitely go for the three biographies, if you are crazy enough about this topic (I’ll let you know which is a good and objective Sylvia Plath one, as soon as I’m done researching).

Besides I would also definitely read The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath as well as Letters Home, BUT - I’m not quite sure, if it’s because I’m not an English native speaker and maybe don’t get everything (even thoug, I believe I do), but sometimes I’ve got no clue what Sylvia is writing about in her journals!? So, in my opition one should read a biography first and then proceed with the journals for a better understanding!

Another book, I’m sure is worth reading are Letters of Ted Hughes, which I also ordered recently. Because I think that different from a biography, letters (and journals) can reveal the “real truth” about a person, more than a biography, written by somebody else! That’s the reason I also hope that they will publish Assia Wevill’s journal one day, because apparently she wrote one, since there are parts of it quotet in her biography!

Hmmm… now I said a lot, but I don’t know if I’m of any help. I promise to come back and say more about every book I’m gonna read in the next months and I’ve got plenty of them here waiting! So, maybe I’m gonna be of a better use then!

Cheers :)