An article from the New Yorker by Ceridwen Dovey about bibliotherapy, healing through books, something readers have known about for a long time. "Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect. "The first use of the term is usually dated to a jaunty 1916 article in The …
Continue reading What Readers Have Known All Along: Reading Can Make You Happier
Review by Benedict Craven Translated from Japanese by E. Dale Saunders I recently put down Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes after three intense reading sessions. It is not an especially long book but for me this signified a new record in reading determination, though it didn’t feel so. The reason being I was …
This is one of the scariest books I’ve read—a dystopian novel for our hyperconnected times. A young woman, Mae, joins the Circle, a Google-like firm. She starts out in Customer Experience (Customer Service in the real world), and rises quickly through the ranks. The culture of the Circle is “sharing is caring” and “privacy is …
Are certain works of fiction valid for the study of development? The premise of this working paper by David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woolcock is that they are. This paper is a challenge to development practitioners and academics "to include fictional representations of development issues within the scope of what they consider to be 'proper' forms of development knowledge". From …
Talking About Books 