You Are What You Read: a Bibliotherapy Evening at the School of Life
Dear (Monomania) Diary,
Quite a while back, I wrote about the topic of book abundance: so many books out there, so little time. How do we choose our next great read? In "I Feel Bad About My Neck" (a brilliant quick read by the way!) Nora Ephron talks about the rapturous-yet-sad sensation experienced when one finishes reading a truly great book. For Ephron this is quite like "emerging from deep under the sea", she needs time to decompress and adjust back to reality and the fact that her next read will probably not come anywhere close in brilliance. Finding truly inspirational books takes time and dedication.
I haven't read anything that required such a period of decompression since Middlemarch a couple of years ago (and I have read piles of books since then!). It is a lengthy novel and I had to persevere to reach the final chapters, but somewhere along its witty and elaborate narrative I got sucked into it. I fell in love with the flaws and the realistic portrayals of its main characters and by the end I was completely sympathetic towards this George Eliot masterpiece which is largely about "our human need to sympathise".
With sympathy appropriately in mind, I signed up to attend a "Bibliotherapy Evening" at The School of Life. It's a social event where we discuss and trade book recommendations, the sort of literary equivalent to "speed-dating". We begin by recollecting in small groups books we read as children and in our adolescence, the "foundation books which shaped us up". What I found amazing was that, despite the fact that we had all grown up in different countries, the women in my group had read and enjoyed more or less the same kind of teenage reads: mystery, romance and lots of Jane Austen (boys' books were entirely different though, lots of sci-fi and Tolkien, ugh!). Girls will be girls anywhere in the world. Or it might just be that girls who attend these events have exactly the same cultural baggage (although I counted at least one girl who was more into self help "spiritual" stuff, who quickly extracted herself from our group).
From then we are sifted into various sub-groups, depending on our current literary interests. What becomes apparent is that after the teenage classics we branch into narrower and narrower reading paths which we seldom stray from, becoming a bit stuck in our "comfort bookshelves". All change then, when we are made to swap reading recommendations, tailor made (as closely as possible) to each other's personal circumstances. This I thought was the best part. I got prescribed "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland because I am currently on a career break trying to find out "what next", just like the book's main character, an ex-Microsoft programmer who is on a quest to find purpose in life. I shall definitely give it a try. Someone posted a recommendation for Joyce's Ulysses as a "great book in a time of crisis" (we were all encouraged to post reading suggestions onto a big tree mural), phew! I would have shifted this one to the "books we intend to read one day" category. I recommended Amelie Nothomb's "Fear and Trembling" to someone with a keen interest in Japan and the absurdities of work life. Oh, and "Middlemarch" too, of course. How I envy those who shall be reading it for the first time!
Yours,
LNH
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