I did a quick search over past posts and I see that bibliotherapy has been a thing that I have been posting the odd link about for A Long Time, though I see the School of Life's page thereon is now 404. In the way that things are constantly being suddenly NEW, I see I also had a link much more recently on the topic about which was cynical.

But I find this article really quite amusing if sometimes determined to use all the Propah Academyk Speek: Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity:

When reading is positioned as therapy, we argue, evaluative intentions intersect awkwardly with the cultural logics of literature, as practitioners and commissioners grapple with what it means to extract ‘wellbeing effects’ from a diffuse and everyday practice. As a result, what might look initially like another simple case of medicalisation turns out to have more uncertain effects. Indeed, as we will show, incorporating the ‘reading cure’ troubles biomedicine, foregrounding both the deficiencies of current public health responses to the perceived crisis of mental health, and the poverty of causal models of therapeutic effect in public health. There are, then, potentially de-medicalising as well as medicalising effects.

Larfed liek drayne:

In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.

What I read

KJ Charles, Copper Script (2025): somehow not among my top KJCs.

Finished Bitch in a Bonnet Vol 2, perhaps even better than vol 1.

Angela Thirkell, The Old Bank House (1949): not quite sure why this got to be picked as a Virago Modern Classic: WO WO Iron Heel of THEM i.e. the 1945 Labour Government, moan whinge, etc etc; also several rather repetitious passages of older generation maundering to themselves about the dire prospects that await the younger members.

Finished Dragon's Teeth, the last parts of which were quite the wild ride.

Latest Slightly Foxed, a bit underwhelmed, well, they can't always be talking about things that really interest/excite me or rouse fond memories I suppose.

On the go

Have started Upton Sinclair. Wide is the Gate (Lanny Budd, #4) (1943) simply because I had very strong 'what happens next? urges after the end of Dragon's Teeth, but that gets answered in the first few chapters, and I think that in this one we're already getting strong hints that Lanny is about to head southwards to Spain, just in time for things to start getting violent. I might take a break.

I have just started a romance by an author I have vaguely heard well of and was a Kobo deal but don't think it's for me.

Up next

Dunno: perhaps that Gail Godwin memoir.

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*Even barely woken up I was not at all sure that this was not all one of those cunning scams that is in fact a fraudster telling you they are your bank/credit card co, but it turned out it was actually about somebody making fraudulent charges - in really odd small ways - on my card, when I got onto the website and found the number to ring - the number being called from with automated menu bearing no resemblance to the one on my card, ahem - went through all the procedures and card is being cancelled and new one sent. SIGH. This is second credit card hoohah in two days, yesterday got text re upcoming due payment for which bill has so far failed to arrive, for the one for which logging into website involves dangers untold and hardships unnumbered and having the mobile app. (Eventually all resolved.)