i remember asking my mum to borrow it when i was, like, 15 and she went all funny about it and i realised why..ooh about a paragraph in haha

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

&

as a contemporary insight "Stop Pretending" by Sonia Somes - which is written in more poetry format than prose about her older sister suffering mental illnes

oh And Virgin Suicides is good too...

oh god me too!!In fact i love all of his books,most of them are about people with mental illness...Spider made me cry!!

you forgot the character of tata beavenhausen in "Im Gonna Fuck Your Boyfriend, and Other Short Stories"

Whay boyfriend?? Oh yeah the imaginary one that takes you on imaginary dates!! Sorry if boys think I'm more awesome than you. Sorry that you're not intelligent enough to understand Dostoevsky. It's sad when people pretend to have read books they have not. Sucks for you. Stop PM me, I just delete.

bwahahahahahahahaha.
goooo away.
you arent even worthy of a millisecond of my time.
kthnks.

Yeah that's the only thing you can say when you've totally been OWNED. I'm sorry to even get into this with you but when you're talking about something that you have no idea about, especially if it's about my favorite book then I have to.

Excuse the bitchfest folks, back on topic:

How about Patrick Bateman from American Psycho?

i just finished paradise by toni morrison (for school. everything i fucking read is for school) and i think at least 7/8 of the 150+ characters in that fucking book are fucking fucked in the head. and having read the whole thing over the weekend, i too am now fucked in the head, but not quite as much as i will be after i write a goddamn paper on it by tuesday.

^ did you like Paradise, cricket? I loved the Morrison books that I've read, and I'm toying with the idea of reading that one.

August in Water for Elephants, but the book itself wasn't very good.
And, from what I've heard, Benji in The Sound and the Fury, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

lol. i bought that for petals for her birthday last year. after reading your post i want her to lend it to me.

what else have you read? i've read beloved, song of solomon, and sula (LOVED sula) before paradise. paradise, yes, i think it could be said that i liked it. i didn't think it had the same character-POW that the other ones did (if that makes any sense, i couldn't think of a good way to put it), but the premise is pretty wild and interesting. didn't love the end because its one of those endings you can interpret all to shit and i guess what i really didn't like about that was that because i read it for a class i had to LISTEN to all kinds of interpretations of it, many of which i thought were liquid shit. so i may have liked it otherwise, but now its too tainted to tell. but overall i'd recommend it. you MAY want to keep track of names a little bit. and if something seems fishy it will probably come up again, but maybe not for 130 pages..........

I've read the same three you did. Song of Solomon is one of my favorite books ever, and Sula, well, I always forget that I read it.
I was walking down the street and say Paradise for sale used outside a store, and I picked it up and brought it with me into the store and ended up getting two other books instead. I have The Bluest Eye on my shelf so I might read that first and then go look for Paradise again. Thank you for the tip about the 130 pages.

Have you read anything by Angela Carter or Jennifer Winterston, they not necessarily mentally ill characters, but, in a way there problems associated though mental anguish etc

theres biograpghies I could say but you wanted fiction yeah?

And at moment there so many biographies - I can't stomach them

But I strongly, recommend reading stuff about Aillen Wuornos rather than relying on the film "monster"

though that can be said about most films v books.

The Trick Is To Keep Breathing - Janice Galloway

__________________

Agreed. This was the first one to pop in my mind - this a fabulous psychological portrait of a disturbed individual's descent into madness, among cultural commentary, etc.. Just fantastic.

I also believe that Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha" is about a mentally ill person, though others may see that differently. They may attribute his idiosyncracies to mysticism - so, this is an issue of "is mysticism crazy?", which some may think is not the case.

Oh, and "Thin Skin" by Emma Forrest is a good example of a book with a borderline personality disordered character.

Lastly, "The Icarus Girl" by Helen Oyeyemi (STELLAR BOOK!!!) is a portrait of a schizophrenic girl/cultural exploration. I highly enjoyed this novel; Oyeyemi is a virtuosic writer.

Most music "biographies"?

__________________
Time is the distance that you can't return by miles.

I escaped somehow. Let's go

actualy [sic] I have quite a blessed life if I'm honest. I have many people to love, hate few and have few money problem's [sic].... What more does a person need? Oh yeah and I have some kind of humbleness unlike you of course ^_^ ~ CarefulCarpenter

Again, hate to repeat this, the main
character was not mentally ill. OK? It appears so but if we know the person who wrote thwe book and if we take the time to know what he was trying to say with the book we'd actually know what the story was about.

"Nihilism was a philosophical position developed in Russia in the 1850s and 1860s, known for “negating more,” in the words of Lebezyatnikov. It rejected family and societal bonds and emotional and aesthetic concerns in favor of a strict materialism, or the idea that there is no “mind” or “soul” outside of the physical world. Linked to nihilism is utilitarianism, or the idea that moral decisions should be based on the rule of the greatest happiness for the largest number of people. Raskolnikov originally justifies the murder of Alyona on utilitarian grounds, claiming that a “louse” has been removed from society. Whether or not the murder is actually a utilitarian act, Raskolnikov is certainly a nihilist; completely unsentimental for most of the novel, he cares nothing about the emotions of others. Similarly, he utterly disregards social conventions that run counter to the austere interactions that he desires with the world. However, at the end of the novel, as Raskolnikov discovers love, he throws off his nihilism. Through this action, the novel condemns nihilism as empty."