Authors Electric

“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...

  I talk to myself in the shower in the mornings – in my head, you understand, out loud would be weird. It’s usually fairly mindless chatter, reminding myself what day it is, etc. but it will be coloured by whatever I’ve been reading during the EMC (early morning cuppa) before I get up. This morning it was in the voice of the Russian narrator of Life's Music, yesterday, suave Italian   Marco from The Hummingbird. If it was poetry, the internal monologue might be in iambic pentameters. It’s not a skill – I just can’t help it. It tends to wear off by the time I'm talking, which is probably just as well, but the mood invoked can last. A couple of blogs ago, I had a brief online conversation with Peter Leyland via the comments section. He mentioned his interest in bibliotherapy and kindly included a link to a paper he had written about it in the magazine   Aeon/Psyche. It contains a fascinating account of his exploration of the impact of reading on mood and wellbeing, wit...