Authors Electric

                                                  Reading Reviews for Online Living                                                 Since the pandemic I have noticed something interesting that has emerged online connected with books. Several dedicated readers have been reviewing books sent to them by publishers and posting the reviews for their followers to beg, borrow, or buy in order to read. These reviewers have a variety of handles: There is  Findingtimetowrite , by Marina Sofia. This deals mainly with books in translation which she publishes;  Adventures in reading, running and working from home  by Liz Dexter who likes non-fiction and who has commented on my own and others’ Authors Electric posts;  Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramb...

  Participation, Beauty and Meaning: An Account of My Research Journey*   ‘ Reading literature can help one regain one’s balance when the mind is distressed or out of equilibrium, as a result of illness, disability, or a traumatic event encountered in the course of an ordinary life’.    I wrote this in my first ever ESREA paper in 2017 and it was the beginning of a journey that I made to find out whether there was any truth in the theory known as bibliotherapy.    In my research since then I have posed the question of whether a reading of literature can help to heal minds and hearts? As a result, I have come across indications from my own life and from outside sources that this can be so. I have amassed a vast number of articles on the subject and published several essays, both in educational journals and as part of a group of bloggers. Most of the latter are writers of novels for children and adults.    Since I joined this group, about five years...

“Only Connect” – Piecing it Together   “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”                      Margaret Schlegel, Howards End   Connecting the inner and the outer worlds is something that we writers do in many ways, sometimes without even thinking: you can call this inspiration or imagination through which you create a character or a story, or a poem; you can think of E. M. Forster’s famous novel, Howards End, where Leonard Bast and Henry Wilcox fail to connect their inner and outer lives and end up in deep trouble; you can follow a talk by Richard Layard, which I did recently, where he says that we can find it possible to connect with our better selves and the better selves...