Bibliotherapy

Psychotherapist, writer, MFA student, book lover, wanderer

[bibliotherapist]

“Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle.”

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.”  - Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

[bibliotherapist]

“Then he asked the clincher. He asked if there’d been any trauma in his life recently, any reason he might feel depressed. David admitted that his wife had just been killed. “Aha!” said the doctor, and he actually looked pleased. He told David that numb lips were a classic form of stress, of panic attack, of something psychosomatic -- he had really nothing to worry about, it’d all come out in the wash when he cheered up. David asked if from now on every single little ailment he ever felt was in some way going to be related to the death of his wife, and the doctor just sort of blinked. “Watch and see if it spreads to the other parts of your face,” the doctor said. “If it does, I’ll put you down for a CAT scan.”

- Robert Shearman, from “Good Grief,” We All Hear Stories in the Dark

[bibliotherapist]

My latest idiosyncratic haul from Amazon: one classic novel, one sex-positive comic, and one delightfully snobbish book about books.

[bibliotherapist]

Middlemarch: George Eliot

First line: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Last line: But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

[bibliotherapist]

A country without a conscience is a country without a soul and a country without a soul is a country that cannot survive.

Winston Churchill

[bibliotherapist]

The Sellout: Paul Beatty

First line: This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.

Last line: And he’s right. I never will.

[bibliotherapist]

Frankenstein: Mary Shelley

First line: You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.

Last line: He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.

[bibliotherapist]

Hobgoblins, chimeras, piles of Medusa heads. You have to keep shocking your psyche, or nothing happens in your writing - nothing charged, nothing enduring. It's imaginary encounters with death that generate life on the page.

Hilary Mantel

[bibliotherapist]

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.

Joseph Pulitzer

[bibliotherapist]

Ada, or Ardor: Vladimir Nabokov

First line: “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).

Last line: Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view described from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more.

[bibliotherapist]

Let the Panic Begin

Two weeks before grad school starts.

[bibliotherapist]

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of an impeccably narrowing corridor.

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor

[bibliotherapist]

Mrs. Dalloway: Virginia Woolf

First line: Mrs. Dalloway sad she would buy the flowers herself.

Last line: For there she was.

[bibliotherapist]

Moby-Dick: Herman Melville

First line: Call me Ishmael.

Second line (because everyone knows the first): Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

Last line: Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

[bibliotherapist]

You're always giving, my therapist said. You have to learn how to take. Whenever you meet a woman, the first thing you do is lend her your books. You think she'll have to see you again in order to return them. But what happens is, she doesn't have the time to read them, & she's afraid if she sees you again you'll expect her to talk about them, & will want to lend her even more. So she  cancels the date. You end up losing a lot of books. You should borrow hers.

Hal Sirowitz, “Lending Out Books”

[bibliotherapist]

2666 (The Part About Fate): Roberto Bolano

First line: When did it all begin? he thought.

Last line: Guadalupe Roncal raised her hand to her mouth, as if she were inhaling a toxic gas, and she couldn’t think what to ask.

[bibliotherapist]

B&N Classics editions..reliable, sturdy, and above all cheap.