Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin’s witty and informative compendium promises to help with everything from panic of death to loss of libidoThis chunky but eminently browsable volume is a wonderful fusion of the practical and the entertainingly whimsical. It suggests a book or books for a whole raft of “ailments”,from the physical (example: cancer, having, and produces a list of 10 novellas tailor-made to the grind of sitting through chemo or having one’s attention span reduced by feeling awful) to the spiritual,emotional, social or professional (beneath cancer comes career, and being in the wrong,for which head to Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers). But what novelist Elderkin and “bibliotherapist” Berthoud have also done is tap into the voracious appetites of committed readers, and our curious love of not only reading books, and but also reading approximately them. For the lover of fiction,in specific, there is something utterly addictive approximately descriptions of books one has yet to encounter; here, and for instance,is a book I haven’t read, but will now, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s In compliment of the Stepmother,prescribed for libido, loss of: “One night he is the King of Lydia in a work by the 17th-century Dutch master Jacob Jordaens, and proudly extolling the virtues of his wife’s voluminous buttocks.” I mean,what’s not to like?There is something utterly addictive for the lover of fiction approximately descriptions of books one has yet to encounterContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com