Tag: Bibliotherapy

Replied to The Old Disturbance by ReverendReverend (bavatuesdays.com)

Great narrative allows for that intimate relation with the reader, and while it was hard to manage at times, I was also strangely comforted by this frank confession from a fictional character in depressed, post-war England.

Antonella calls it bibliotherapy, and I think she got that term from Schopenhauer’s notes on aging with dignity, so I think I’m in pretty good company all around. It feels good to be back on the blog.

Source: The Old Disturbance | bavatuesdays

Glad to hear you are finding your way through it all Jim. I thought I had never heard of ‘bibliotherapy’ before, only to realise I had saved an article from The New Yorker a few years ago about the topic:

Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

Source: Can Reading Make You Happier? by Ceridwen Dovey

And a post from Kin Lane on the benefits of reading:

Reading a book is the answer for a lot of what troubles me. When I’ve had to much screen time–read a book! When I’m tired from work and want to turn on the TV–read a book. When I’m frustrated with the current state of things in this country–read a book. When I can’t shut down the voices in my head because I’m spinning out about something–read a book.

Source: Reading a Book is The Answer by Kin Lane

Personally, I have felt myself being consumed by the dots and really doubled down on books (and audiobooks). I find it useful to get out of my own head sometimes.

Also, on other dots, I have turned to vinyl, and listening to albums in their entirety, in party inspired by your Vinylcasts.

Bookmarked Can Reading Make You Happier? (The New Yorker)

So even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others better, it is a way of treating ourselves better. Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

Ceridewn Dovey takes a look at bibliotherapy and the act of reading as a cure. Some argue that readers are more empathetic, while others suggest that it provides pleasure, whatever the particular outcome maybe, reading has shown to provide many health benefits. As Kin Lane suggests, when in doubt, read a book.

As a side, the article opens with a nice description of reading:

In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.