“The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath

I’ve been reluctant to pick this book up for quite some time, despite the fact that it’s been on my to read list for ages. I just always felt that since it was a classic, there was no way for it to live up to the hype. I feel a little differently now, after finishing it I think that it should be required reading for high schoolers, similar to The Catcher in the Rye, I can’t believe that they aren’t paired together. There’s a lot of similarities, but that isn’t really the focus of this.

For those who don’t know, The Bell Jar is the semi-autobiographical novel Plath wrote about a summer where she fell apart and tried to kill herself. It’s also her only novel, the rest of her writing is poetry. The protagonist, Esther, lives in New York City on scholarship and is working for a magazine. She doesn’t know what she wants to do for a career, but feels limited since she can only pick one thing to do. Heap on the fact that it seems like all the men in her life are pigs, and you can see why she starts coming apart.

Slowly she stops working on her writing and ultimately cannot find the will to eat, write, or even sleep. Having always been a straight-A student, she begins to fall behind and just cannot bring herself to start up again. She describes her mental condition as similar to being stuck in a bell jar, breathing her own air and unable to escape. This entire section I found very relatable, even in the modern era. For so much of the time students are put into competition against each other, and it feels as though if you get a bad grade you start to fall behind. For most of my schooling one of my biggest fears was to fall behind in classes and be unable to pick it up again, so I was quite like Esther, always studying out of lack of anything else to do and felt guilty when I wasn’t productive.

It reminded me a lot of “The Yellow Wallpaper” that short story where the husband is trying to restrict his wife by sticking her in a hospital. There are all of these nice boxes that Esther is considering doing as a career, one of which is being a housewife. A number of men try to seduce her, but she professes to not want to marry or have kids, and therefore they all lose interest in the end. She also sees right through them to all of their many flaws, and therefore she also loses interest in them. Her struggling to figure out where she belongs contributes to the bell jar closing in around her, as she cannot make up her mind what path to take and therefore does nothing.

There’s another side of it where you can see the medicine and how doctors dealt with mental health. Of course everyone was smoking back then. And the go-to treatment seemed to be rest, glucose, and shock therapy every once in a while. Another one of the characters had a lobotomy. All of which is horribly outdated now, you can even tell how the other characters treat Esther after she attempts suicide how taboo anything related to mental health is. I think it has improved since then, although there still is a fair bit of ground to cover.

This is a highly important book that more people need to read for a number of reasons. 1. It gives an honest look at what it is like to have a mental illness and be suicidal. 2. The trials of Esther and the other girls demonstrate how hard it was to be a woman back then, especially when dealing with men, sex, and marriage. 3. Class issues come up as well, Esther needs to work hard to keep her scholarship and her mother cannot afford all her medical bills eventually.

This book lies at the center of several issues, all of which are still relevant today. Sure the customs have changed and the details are different, but at the heart of it there is still the threat of the bell jar dropping down on any of us. And reading about one person’s journey through it can help you make it out yourself.

"Guardian of the Dead" by Karen Healey

I mainly picked up this book because there's an asexual character in it, and I wanted to see how he was portrayed in a typical YA fantasy fiction. 

Honestly, this is one of the more socially conscious works of YA fiction that I've read. Not only is there an asexual character, the protagonist's sister is gay, and she has a Muslim housemate. All of them are portrayed really well, we hear about struggles of coming out to friends and family and Ellie's housemate's fight to get halal meats in the dining halls. It does seem as though Healey is equating asexuality and aromanticism at times, but also sometimes not, it's a little unclear. The only other thing is that Ellie herself, the main character, is just a normal, heterosexual, white girl. I'd love to read a book like this where the asexual isn't the token best friend but is instead the hero. Maybe next time... Having said that Healey does pretty well with imbibing a more feminist tone to it, so that’s good.

Also a big part of the book incorporates Maoi culture and mythology. Which is really cool, it’s not usually focused on in teen lit. The theory behind all of the supernatural stuff is actually pretty similar to American Gods if anyone really enjoyed that sort of mythology-in-the-real-world type thing.

Other than the somewhat diverse characters, it's a typical YA story. Sassy female protagonist learns that her love interest has supernatural powers and that she has them as well! They fight and things. But I think that this is a good direction for books like this to go in, it has a little more to it than your typical teen novel.

“The Laws of Medicine” by Siddhartha Mukherjee

This book is actually a companion to the author's TED Talk, found here. He gained a lot of popularity as the author of "The Emperor of all Maladies" and "An Intimate History of the Gene" but in contrast to those, this book is very slim and easy to get through. He also speaks frequently about wanting to make science understandable to non-scientists, so don't let that aspect of it scare you off.

I hadn't watched the TED Talk before picking up this book, I just liked that it was a more introspective work about medicine and being a doctor. The focus of this piece is on how uncertain the practice of medicine can be. When you're younger, you think of doctors as just these magic people who can make everything better, but that illusion begins to fade as you get older and realize how imperfect their art is. Mukherjee's response to this was to look for the laws of medicine, the guiding principles. Similar to the laws of physics and chemistry, what did the practice of medicine always follow? (Sidebar: his TED talk is more about medicine in general, and they actually work as separate entities.)

He came up with three rules. The first one: "a strong intuition is better than a weak test". This is about how you need to have a context and a reason for performing tests on people, as false positives are rampant and you need to give the result meaning. Second, "typical results give us rules, outliers give us laws". This leads to a discussion of how even outliers contain meaning in their results, even if the researchers don't like to talk about them. Finally, "behind every perfect study is a perfect human bias". The reality is that we don't know how different treatments will work on everyone, since everyone is different. We can determine trends, but even those have biases towards the upper classes, or white people, or men. 

The end result is that medicine is still a very uncertain practice in the world. And it still needs a human element behind it to use judgement and make choices. This in and of itself is something that I think needs to be talked about more, the fact that doctors are in a field where not much is known and we know the unknowns are coming back to bite us in the end. The laws that he describes here don't only apply to medicine, but also to other studies where they are using tests and trying to parse out the truth (scientific research in general could very easily be grouped in here). And the more we study the more we realize how little we do know about our own bodies.

This short and sweet novel is a really good discussion of that, and one that makes me eager to read Mukherjee's other works as well. Each of the laws is followed by a discussion of science or medicine and how this has applied to the history of medicine, as well as more contemporary anecdotes. It is very readable, but also illuminating. And since it's not too long, it can be finished in a single sitting. I'd highly recommend picking it up if you get the chance!

“Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley

Honestly, I found this classic to be a bit of a disappointment. The various spin-offs and the science fiction culture that has emerged as a result of this story is probably better and more fascinating than the original itself.

Of course there’s the classic misconception: the scientist’s name is Victor Frankenstein, his monster is just a monster. And interestingly, it never says that an electric shock is what causes the monster to come to life. Victor is actually an idiot in my opinion. He creates a monster, then is so horrified by what he created that he flees his apartment and waits for the monster to go away. Nice dude. You really nailed it there. And that’s how literally every single problem begins: because Victor couldn’t take care of a being that he created voluntarily. Or bother making his creature look alright enough to not be horrifying. Or make a creature that isn’t physically superior to him in every way. It’s as though he was trying to create a mess or something.

Then once the monster gets out there and actually hurts someone, his way of dealing with it isn’t to speak up, but to ignore the problem and hope that it goes away. Classic men, am I right? And when the monster tells him that he just wants a companion, Victor refuses and, knowing the consequences of this choice, brings about the deaths of his friends and family. What a weak-ass protagonist, I spent the majority of the book being pissed off at him.

There’s a lot of different aspects of this book to talk about, but I want to focus on what we owe each other. Victor brought the monster into this world, making him a parent in a pretty literal way. He created the monster, he gave him life. And then he dropped him like a hot potato. Does he owe the monster something more?

I think, yeah, he does. If you are raising another creature then you have a responsibility for it. Victor recognizes this towards the end and admits his fault, saying that he should have either raised him right or ended him. While I won’t advocate for destroying naughty children, this seems like pretty clear support for abortion to me. Victor could not teach the monster correctly, and therefore should never have had him in the first place.

Then there’s this question of identity. Victor never gives the monster a name. The monster is then this unknowable mystery beast. Friend? Foe? What? It’s terrifying precisely because anyone who meets him does not know what to categorize him as. And since his companion was never made, the monster is the only one of his kind, a unique specimen. This serves to further alienate him from society that he longs to be a part of.

His appearance figures heavily into that identity as well. Others find the sight of him repulsive, and their reaction to his as a monster is precisely what turns him into one. He starts off loving and compassionate, but when turned away by every human that he meets he becomes a murderer. Because that’s what society expects of him, and he finds it easier to go with the flow of that rather than resist it.

All in all, the monster is a much more compelling character than dumb ol Victor. Taking a look at his character and the results of his abandonment is definitely preferable to watching Victor blame himself and then not do a damn thing about it. Which unfortunately is what most of the book focuses on. Hard to imagine that this book kickstarted so much of the sci-fi that we see today.

“…But I’m NOT Racist!: Tools for Well-Meaning Whites” by Kathy Obear

This was a really interesting read, and it was a free download on kindle a while ago when I got it (I don’t think it’s free anymore though). Essentially this is a book written by a white person for white people who want to be an ally for people of color and help other people around them be less racist.

I’d highly recommend the read for anyone, whether you’re passionate about this subject or not. Racism is not going anywhere anytime soon, and it’s on all of us to try and halt its progress the best we can. This book goes through the mistakes that white people tend to make when discussing race and then offers some alternatives for them.

Pretty much the only critique that I have is that it can seem as though Obear only focuses on the mistakes without providing many alternatives or solutions to these problems. She repeatedly throws at us that we are all unconsciously biased and have a fear of being called racist in front of others, but the ways she gives to minimize this are few and far between. Honestly it seemed like the purpose of her writing this was more to make people aware that this is how they feel and what is going on within their heads rather than to give more solutions.

Having said that, towards the end she does provide some helpful suggestions. She has a whole methodology for taking other white people’s problematic statements and trying to make them realize just how triggering it is. The main idea is to not get angry and yell at them to intimidate or be “the good white” but to calmly explain that they are making a simple mistake, but one that can have a big effect on people. Her philosophy comes from a place of compassion, rather than one of anger.

She also emphasizes having spaces of just white people to talk about racism, which is an idea that I had never encountered before. It sounds ridiculous, how can you talk about racism without people of color, but it also makes sense. It is not the job of people of color to educate us or to point out all of our mistakes, therefore setting up an alternative space to talk about issues and work through them can be ideal. It made me realize that I don’t have a space like that in my life, I should probably work to find one.

This is a quick read, but it is so important that white people continually work on becoming more aware of their own biases and how those manifest in society. Only by working together can we reduce racism in our lives, and that starts with us, right here. Please go read this book, it is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to combating racism and it is so crucial if you want to give others the humanity they deserve.