TO READ ALOUD: A Literary Toolkit for Wellbeing

Reading a story aloud to another person creates a bond between two people, and this practice was once a common pleasure between adults. Now has come the time to rediscover it with a book which brings literature, and prose literature in particular, back into the texture of our everyday lives. Described as 'A Literary Toolkit for Wellbeing', Francesco Dimitri has selected 75 extracts of an average 1000 words each from writers ranging from Cicero to Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse to Neil Gaiman, Joanne Harris and Robert Macfarlane alongside less familiar names. Dip into some Tolkien, 'Uncle Abrahams Romance' by Edith Nesbit, 'Kipps' by H. G. Wells, 'Practical Magic' by Alice Hoffman, 'Bank Holiday' by Katherine Mansfield, 'Speech Made on his 70th Birthday' by Mark Twain, 'Delicacies For Discussion', 'The Coming of the Fairies' by Arthur Conan Doyle or 'The Sexual Life of Catherine M' by Catherine Millet. The novelist Flaubert read aloud everything he wrote to check the quality of his writing. The blurbs written in house by Bibliophile are dictated deliberately for exactly the same reason. Stories of old were read aloud but were also reflections, meditations, pieces of practical philosophy. Reading aloud used to be a widely enjoyed leisure activity and a way of giving and receiving advice. The time has come to rediscover it. Arranged under 10 thematic chapters - Love, Loss, Change, Pleasure, Work, Illness, Nature, Chaos, Lightness and Wonder. 452 elegant pages, pagemarker.