LITERARY FIRST AID KIT

 

Copyright © Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2015

 

All rights reserved.

 

No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.

 

Abbie Headon has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

 

Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 

Summersdale Publishers Ltd
46 West Street
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1RP
UK

 

www.summersdale.com

 

Printed and bound in the Czech Republic

 

eISBN: 978-1-78372-626-4

 

 

 

 

To Mum, Dad and James, for raising a bookworm, and to Jeremy, for marrying one

CONTENTS

Introduction

Everyday Life

Health and Beauty

Life’s Temptations

Family

Childhood and Growing Up

Love and Romance

Working Life

Leisure Time

Books and Reading

Travel

The Natural World

Life’s Big Questions

Index of Authors

INTRODUCTION

Why do we love books? I think the answer lies in the fact that when we dive into a book, we enter another world and leave the cares of our own lives behind for a while. Books can take us to places we’ll never go, from Sauron’s Dark Tower to the Hundred Acre Wood, from the age of the dinosaurs to the twenty-fifth century, from the grinding poverty of Victorian London to the most extravagant excesses of the Sun King’s court at Versailles.

Through reading books, we come to know how people tick. We meet braggers and bullies, saints and sinners, lovers and liars – and we recognise aspects of ourselves in all of them. When a character grieves or rejoices, we learn vicariously what it’s like to experience those emotions. Books allow us to get inside the minds of misfits and oddballs, and to forgive ourselves for our failings. We watch characters succeed and fail, and we see how their lives unfold, whether as a result of their actions or simply of blind chance.

In this Literary First Aid Kit, I’ve endeavoured to bring together the most inspiring, comforting and reassuring extracts from well-known books, in a longer-form follow-up to my Poetry First Aid Kit. While I was researching this book I revisited many old favourites of mine to dig out their most cheering literary nuggets, such as the time in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat when the narrator looks up his symptoms in the British Library and ends up diagnosing himself with everything except housemaid’s knee, and I made lots of new discoveries as well, led on a page-hopping journey from book to book by recommendations from friends and family, and by the sheer luck of stumbling upon new gems in the bookshelves.

In this selection of literary excerpts, I hope you’ll find ingredients to cheer and console you. You can search through chapters that relate to whatever is worrying you at the moment, or simply dip in at random to see what cure your heart leads you to, whether it’s the key to a decorating dilemma or a possible answer to one of life’s big questions.

As the old song has it, ‘Love is good for anything that ails you’ – but after a course of literary first aid, I hope you’ll agree with me that books are just what the doctor ordered, every time.

I’d love to hear your literary prescriptions, too – drop me a line via Twitter and let me know how the medicine went down, at @AbbieHeadon.

 

Abbie Headon, 2015