A Moment of the Mind

"[...]There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see [...] it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her." — Jeanette Winterson in The Guardian

What was on Marilyn Monroe's bookshelf:

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Paris Blues by Harold Flender
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Fall by Albert Camus
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck
From:Media Bistro
See also: Women Reading
Photo from: Breathing Books