I recently came across this excellent article, The Reading Cure. Written by Blake Morrison, and published earlier this year in The Guardian, the entire article is available online and well worth a look. The article features a Get Into Reading Project now thriving in the United Kingdom. Morrison also offers a wonderful context for the project—rich instances where writers and readers have found words healing.
Consider these highlights:
If she’s evangelical in the cause. . . [Jane Davis, founder of Get Into Reading] that’s because of the almost religious role which books have played in her own life—notably, Doris Lessing’s novel Shikasta, reading which, as a young woman, pushed her ‘into something like a nervous breakdown. I felt so disturbed by it that I wrote to Doris, care of her publisher, blaming her and asking for help. She wrote back telling me to read more and offering money for books if I needed it. “I am not your teacher but you need to read,” she said. I was a single mother living on social security but in the end I decided what I needed wasn’t Doris’s money but a public library. And, for me, the clue of Shikasta—that life is serious and you have to do something with it—was a lifesaver.’
The self can get help from a book, then. But the best kind of help doesn’t necessarily come by way of self-help books.
The inseparability of reading and writing is something which Proust acknowledges when he defines the book as a ‘sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.’ It’s often said that books ‘take us out of ourselves’, but in reality the best literature is surreptitiously taking us inside ourselves, deeper than we might have expected or chosen to go.
The inseparability of reading and writing-----
A book as an optical instrument-----
These seem like important pieces.
