New Olive Editions

I've never read Sylvia Plath. Never had to and, as I've admitted before, I read so much new stuff that I've not squeezed any "classics" into my reading schedule for quite some time. Some days I wish I could go back to school full time so that I could read and study more of these.

If I could, I would love to take a Gothic Lit class, if such a thing exists. I think that would be fun.

That's besides the point. I guess it's time for me to read The Bell Jar because I actually received a copy of it in the mail the other day from Harper Perennial. Yep. How could I not now that I actually have a copy, right?

It's one of the latest "modern classic" to get the Olive Edition treatment. And I really love the look of them. They're $10 mass markets (to fit in your pocket, as their ad says) with bright, eye-catching covers. They're intriguing. Probably under the assumption that you already know something about the books.

This latest set includes Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and The Bell Jar. I did some poking around and found last year's titles for you as well. They are Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

The books are P.S. Editions and with the exception of Pynchon's book, come with extras such as biographical info and other reading recommendations.

I guess I'm going to have to make an honest effort to get to my growing collection of "old stuff everyone says I should read" now. Undoubtedly it'll be like reading all the new stuff I want to read and some will be hits and some will be misses. I kind of like that these editions are not necessarily the most well-known books by some of these authors, nor are they all particularly old. I kind of wonder which books they'll do next just so I can see what they continue to pick as modern classics.