Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors, which feels almost ridiculous to say because reading him is rarely an enjoyable experience in the normal sense of the word. I do not finish one of his books feeling refreshed or particularly optimistic about humanity. Usually I feel like somebody reached into my head, pulled out a thought I had never properly admitted to myself, and then made some miserable Russian man say it two hundred years before I was born. I think that is why I

I think the part of The Bell Jar that stayed with me the most was the fig tree, which is probably not very original considering it's one of the most talked-about parts of the book, but whatever. I get why people don't shut up about it. Esther imagines all these different versions of her future hanging in front of her like figs. One has a husband and children, another has her becoming a poet, another has a successful career, another has travel and experiences and a completely

I keep thinking about how Frankenstein’s creature and Barbie are kind of the same person, which sounds ridiculous until you think about it for more than five minutes. One is an eight-foot-tall creature assembled from pieces of dead bodies by a young scientist who becomes immediately horrified by what he has done. The other is a blonde plastic woman with permanently arched feet, a microscopic waist, and a Dreamhouse. Frankenstein is dark and miserable and full of death; Barbie

I knew the basic story of The Picture of Dorian Gray before I ever actually read it. Dorian is beautiful, someone paints his portrait, he somehow gets to stay young while the portrait gets older and uglier, and obviously this arrangement does not end particularly well for anyone involved. I went into it thinking the creepy part would be the painting. A secret portrait upstairs slowly turning into some horrifying version of you sounds like the obvious nightmare here. But after

There is a moment in Dracula where Lucy Westenra asks why a girl can't marry three men. I underlined it because, first of all, girl. She has just received three marriage proposals in one day, which is a ridiculous enough situation on its own, and she is genuinely upset that accepting one means hurting the other two. Then she writes to Mina, “Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” It is funny. It is also one of those line