Reviews - Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts

185 reviews for:

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts

Sylvia Plath

3.88 AVERAGE

fleurphillips27's review against another edition

3.5

informative relaxing medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: N/A

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

starrydynamo's review against another edition

5.0

sylvia plath genuinely has (or had, but i hate using past tense) the most beautiful mind in the world. i really love the way she words her stories, and she's also the only author i've read who really focuses on what it was like to be a woman in the 1950s, aside from Roald Dahl, who i feel like mainly focused on what it was like to be a murdering woman in the 1950s. i loved all the short stories, even if i feel like they came to rather abrupt ends. the diary entries were definitely my favourite part of this book, though. i can't believe that a person can just sit down and write like that. it feels unreal to me. how are you just spewing pure poetry about the party you went to last night. how does that happen.

anyway, i'll choose not to question it (further). you're an icon, sylvia!!

c1nnamon_grl's review against another edition

3.75

reflective

jelena_isa's review against another edition

4.5

dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

bookwoods's review against another edition

3.0

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams is a wide collection of Sylvia Plath´s short stories and a few of her personal diary entries. My reading experience of it was quite the roller coaster, it has stories I absolutely adored, paragraphs that I read dozens of times and will read in the future, but most of the pieces were simply okay. Brilliantly written, yes, they just didn´t make feel much and some went way over my head - I couldn´t figure out what was the point of them. The stories started to feel very similar, Plath clearly has her own style in short story writing, which unfortunately didn´t amaze me apart from the few exceptions. I also wish there had been more extracts from Plath´s diaries. I found it extremely interesting to read about her life and thoughts. Though I was a bit confused with all the strange, unintroduced people that were mentioned, which is of course what you get from reading small bits of someones journal. So rating such a collection is quite hard and I ended up giving Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams pretty neutral three stars. I was never hating what I was reading and as I said, I came across some amazing examples of what astounding things can be achieved with words.