Bibliotherapy

I thought you might enjoy this article in the New Yorker about bibliotherapy: "Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect."

Can Reading Make You Happier?

by Ceridwen Dovey

Quote: 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.”

The Books We Leave Behind

This is a truly beautiful reflection on life, and a life of reading:

How I mourned my sister through the books she left behind... but in Emily's library, I also saw a life well lived by Tom Rachman (Washington Post; you can get a free .edu subscription)

Here's a quote from the article to give you a sense of what it is like:

I kept about 250 volumes. The books sat on the floor behind me in my study, piled where my girlfriend and I had spent two afternoons writing “Emily Rachman” in the front of each, to ensure that they never just dissolve into my collection. Months passed before I could alphabetize hers among mine. My study remained impassable with Emily’s books. I devoted myself exclusively to reading as many as I could — an imagined dialogue, as happens whenever books are borrowed, one reader hearing the perceptions of who preceded. [...] When I left her apartment, the built-in bookshelves were empty but for the dust. What, I wonder, have the new owners placed there? Books? Something else altogether? They’ll never know the jubilation those shelves once brought to a young woman.