Read Online The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You by Ella Berthoud, Susan Elderkin - Free Book Online
Authors: Ella Berthoud, Susan Elderkin
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self-consciousness that is unique to humanity. Run with the pack, clatter through deserted streets, take no heed of human laws. Dash until your pads bleed, then lick them dry. Discover your doggy nature and your roseate cheeks will no longer concern you.
READING AILMENT
Book buyer, being a compulsive
CURE
Invest in an e-reader and/or create a “current reading” shelf
W e know your type. You love the look and feel of books so much that you yearn to possess them. Just walking into a bookshop turns you on. Your greatest pleasure in life is bringing the new books home and slipping them onto your immaculate shelves. You stand back to admire them, wonder what it will be like to have read them—then you go off and do something else instead.
Invest in an e-reader. By reducing a book to its words—no elegant cover, no fashionable or esoteric author name for others to notice—you will soon discover whether you really want to read the book or whether you just want to own it. If it passes the test, wait until you’re actually ready to read it before you press “download” (keeping it on a wish list in the meantime). If, and only if, you love it when you read it on your e-reader, then you may allow yourself a beautiful hard copy to keep on your shelves, to read and reread, to love and touch and drool over, to show off to your friends, and just
have
.
If an e-reader is not for you, designate one shelf in your house a “current reading” shelf. This should be near your bed, or wherever you like to read most, and contain the half dozen books next up on your to-read list. Keep the turnover on this shelf brisk. Because rule number one is that you can only buy a new book when one of the other books on your current reading shelf has been read and returned to its place on your general shelves. Rule number two is that you must read the books on this shelf in the order in which they arrive there, more or less. And rule number three is that if any of the books are leapfrogged more than once or stay on the shelf for more than four months, they go to a friend or a charity shop.
No cheating! You’ll be cured of your habit within the year.
BOREDOM
Desperate Characters
PAULA FOX
I f you suffer from boredom, whether you live in London, Shanghai, Yaroslavl’, or a tiny mountain hamlet, it might just be your own boring fault. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” Samuel Johnson said—or at least James Boswell said he said it, in his
Life of Johnson
, more than two hundred years ago. Johnson knew it wasn’t fair to blame boredom on geography: each of us is responsible for whipping up our own interest in the world.
In
Desperate Characters
, a dark gem of a novel by the American writer Paula Fox, a bite from a feral cat in Brooklyn shakes a bourgeois New York couple out of their congealed routine. The setting is New York in the last years of the 1960s. “We are all of us dying of boredom,” a pompous playwright tells Sophie and Otto Bentwood at a neighborhood party, and the Bentwoods do not disagree. “Boredom,” the playwright goes on, “is the why of the war, the why of the assassinations, the why of why.” Is she right? In the wake of the deaths of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., the calm, coherent backdrop of the Eisenhower era had been replaced by a noisome collage of cultural change in which Vietnam, hippies, the Pill, and the civil rights movement jostled in the collective unconscious. Amid such confusion, can the sense of pointlessness the Bentwoods and their friends feel truly be put down to boredom?
Set in their ways and childless in their early forties, Otto and Sophie have bought a town house in a gentrifying part of Brooklyn, as have many of their friends. But at this early stage of transition, the neighborhood has rejected the transplants—or, at least, is not accepting the new organs easily. Seamy remnants of the neighborhood’s previous population linger on the
READING AILMENT
Book buyer, being a compulsive
CURE
Invest in an e-reader and/or create a “current reading” shelf
W e know your type. You love the look and feel of books so much that you yearn to possess them. Just walking into a bookshop turns you on. Your greatest pleasure in life is bringing the new books home and slipping them onto your immaculate shelves. You stand back to admire them, wonder what it will be like to have read them—then you go off and do something else instead.
Invest in an e-reader. By reducing a book to its words—no elegant cover, no fashionable or esoteric author name for others to notice—you will soon discover whether you really want to read the book or whether you just want to own it. If it passes the test, wait until you’re actually ready to read it before you press “download” (keeping it on a wish list in the meantime). If, and only if, you love it when you read it on your e-reader, then you may allow yourself a beautiful hard copy to keep on your shelves, to read and reread, to love and touch and drool over, to show off to your friends, and just
have
.
If an e-reader is not for you, designate one shelf in your house a “current reading” shelf. This should be near your bed, or wherever you like to read most, and contain the half dozen books next up on your to-read list. Keep the turnover on this shelf brisk. Because rule number one is that you can only buy a new book when one of the other books on your current reading shelf has been read and returned to its place on your general shelves. Rule number two is that you must read the books on this shelf in the order in which they arrive there, more or less. And rule number three is that if any of the books are leapfrogged more than once or stay on the shelf for more than four months, they go to a friend or a charity shop.
No cheating! You’ll be cured of your habit within the year.
BOREDOM
Desperate Characters
PAULA FOX
I f you suffer from boredom, whether you live in London, Shanghai, Yaroslavl’, or a tiny mountain hamlet, it might just be your own boring fault. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” Samuel Johnson said—or at least James Boswell said he said it, in his
Life of Johnson
, more than two hundred years ago. Johnson knew it wasn’t fair to blame boredom on geography: each of us is responsible for whipping up our own interest in the world.
In
Desperate Characters
, a dark gem of a novel by the American writer Paula Fox, a bite from a feral cat in Brooklyn shakes a bourgeois New York couple out of their congealed routine. The setting is New York in the last years of the 1960s. “We are all of us dying of boredom,” a pompous playwright tells Sophie and Otto Bentwood at a neighborhood party, and the Bentwoods do not disagree. “Boredom,” the playwright goes on, “is the why of the war, the why of the assassinations, the why of why.” Is she right? In the wake of the deaths of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., the calm, coherent backdrop of the Eisenhower era had been replaced by a noisome collage of cultural change in which Vietnam, hippies, the Pill, and the civil rights movement jostled in the collective unconscious. Amid such confusion, can the sense of pointlessness the Bentwoods and their friends feel truly be put down to boredom?
Set in their ways and childless in their early forties, Otto and Sophie have bought a town house in a gentrifying part of Brooklyn, as have many of their friends. But at this early stage of transition, the neighborhood has rejected the transplants—or, at least, is not accepting the new organs easily. Seamy remnants of the neighborhood’s previous population linger on the
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