"Quinquireme of Nineveh" -- Peter Leyland
“Quinquireme of Nineveh” I was reading a novel called Home by Marilynne Robinson and when I got to the end, I realised that it had in some ways improved my mental health by the process of bibliotherapy. By the end of this very engrossing and comforting book, my longstanding and recurring problems with anxiety and depression had been if not entirely put to bed, then given notice that I was not going to let them get the better of me. Since publishing a piece for psyche.co last April about how one might use literature as the bibliotherapy defined by Montaigne, Plato et al, I have come across a number of articles and taken part in events which address the theme of how we can help our minds to heal through reading literature. The first article is by journalist, Josie Glausiusz, who had lost her young son to a rare form of brain cancer and who describes in her piece how poems had given her an anchor in her grief. I came across Josie’s article on Twitter, now kn...