Find books for fee or small fee

https://www.9thstreetbooks.com/how-to-get-a-library-card-online/

Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer FACTORING HUMANITY

Quote from reading Factoring Humanity: "Maybe the reason we sleep so much is that that's when we interact most closely with the overmind. Maybe dreams occur while our daily individual experiences are being uploaded to the overmind. It can kill you, you know--not dreaming. You can get all the rest in the world, but if you take chemicals that prevent you from dreaming, you'll die; that contact 'is' essential." Plays with Roger Penrose's theories of consciousness and Michael Persinger's experimental neuropsychology. He also refers to Philip Lieberman, who questioned Noam Chomsky's theories, and who wrote EVE SPOKE. As with another of my favorite authors, Richard Powers, Sawyer has explored multiple disciplines and done the research to find the juxtaposition point between and wrapped it all in compelling narrative for his readers' delight.

Canadian Authors Engel and Monro

Reading Marian Engel's THE GLASSY SEA after just finishing Alice Monro's TOO MUCH HAPPINESS. A quote I love from Engel: Time wins me away from the diamond of the soul. Said in reference to her character's spiritual experience while becoming a nun. Reading these two Canadian authors back to back paints a portrait of what it meant to be a young girl growing up in Canada between the Wars against a landscape of not just the harsh winters, but also the sweet, seductive brevity of summer. More Quotes from The Glassy Sea: "Life, I decided, is a sentence between brackets: these brackets must be seen to contain what is, not what might have been." and "If there's no absolute truth, you might as well go for what you want."

Book Matching

https://www.bookmatcher.app/how-it-works

Book Retreats

https://www.businesstraveller.com/lifestyle/how-to-fix-burnout-skip-the-spa-try-a-book-butler/

Leonora Carrington autobiography DOWN BELOW

https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/leonora-carrington/315580-down_below_read.html

medhum.org

Medhum.org

https://medhum.org/topics/#topic-tags

Will need to correct the broken link to NYU's database.

Does not seem to be as useful, or as compelling, as the original.

Reading Fiction and the Unconscious

by Simon O. Lesser

Published in 1957

LC 57-9091

Contents:

I. The Nature of the Inquiry

(Introducing psychoanalytical grounding for why fiction matters: didactic and mimetic intentions of the author.)

"By and large psychoanalytic interest in literature has run backward, from the work of art to its creator, whereas ours will flow forward, from the work of art to the reader."

II. The Reader of Fiction

Freud: the meager satisfaction that we extract from reality leaves us starving

(Fiction enables us to satisfy needs frustrated by reality.)

III. The Materials of Fiction

IV. The Appeals to the Parts of the Psyche

V. The Functions of Form

VI. The Language of Fiction

VII. Movement and Other Resources of Form

VIII. The Process of Response

IX. Conscious and Unconscious Perception

X. Participation and the Pathways to Satisfaction

XI. Tragedy, Comedy and the Esthetic Experience

Reading Recovery

https://www.academia.edu/78372467/Reading_for_Recovery_R4R_Bibliotherapy_for_addictions?email_work_card=reading-history 

 The Center of Alcohol Studies (CAS) Library at Rutgers University developed "Reading for Recovery" (R4R), an open-access online resource designed to bridge the gap between individuals struggling with substance abuse and expert-vetted literature. Funded by an ALA Carnegie-Whitney grant, the project utilizes bibliotherapy—the use of books to address therapeutic needs—by combining clinical self-help materials with broader literary works. 

 The initiative aims to empower librarians and addiction counselors with a searchable tool to support recovery, which is viewed as a continuous process rather than a discrete event. The R4R collection includes titles that are professionally reviewed and available in public or academic libraries, disseminated via a LibGuide and social networks like Goodreads and LibraryThing. 

 Sample from Appendix

The abbreviated version of the short story F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Sleeping and Waking” with questions, as used at the conference bibliotherapy workshop F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Sleeping and Waking” 

When some years ago I read a piece by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought there was nothing further to be said about insomnia. I see now that that was because I had never had much; it appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations. […] 

With a man I knew the trouble commenced with a mouse; in my case I like to trace it to a single mosquito. […] 

It is astonishing how much worse one mosquito can be than a swarm. A swarm can be prepared against, but one mosquito takes on a personality – a hatefulness, a sinister quality of the struggle to the death. 

This personality appeared all by himself in September on the twentieth floor of a New York hotel, as out of place as an armadillo. He was the result of New Jersey’s decreased appropriation for swamp drainage, which had sent him and other younger sons into neighboring states for food. 

The night was warm – but after the first encounter, the vague slappings of the air, the futile searches, the punishment of my own ears a split second too late, I followed the ancient formula and drew the sheet over my head. And so there continued the old story, the bitings through the sheet, the sniping of exposed sections of hand holding the sheet in place, the pulling up of the blanket with ensuing suffocation – followed by the psychological change of attitude, increasing wakefulness, wild impotent anger – finally a second hunt. 

This inaugurated the maniacal phase – the crawl under the bed with the standing lamp for torch, the tour of the room with final detection of the insect’s retreat on the ceiling and attack with knotted towels, the wounding of oneself – my God! – After that there was a short convalescence that my opponent seemed aware of, for he perched insolently beside my head – but I missed again. 

At last, after another half hour that whipped the nerves into a frantic state of alertness came the Pyrrhic victory, and the small mangled spot of blood, my blood, on the headboard of the bed. As I said, I think of that night, two years ago, as the beginning of my sleeplessness – because it gave me the sense of how sleep can be spoiled by one infinitesimal incalculable element. It made me, in the now archaic phraseology, “sleep-conscious.” 

I worried whether or not it was going to be allowed me. I was drinking, intermittently but generously, and on the nights when I took no liquor the problem of whether or not sleep was specified began to haunt me long before bedtime. 

A typical night (and I wish I could say such nights were all in the past) comes after a particularly sedentary work-and-cigarette day. It ends, say, without any relaxing interval, at the time for going to bed. All is prepared, the books, the glass of water, the extra pajamas lest I awake in rivulets of sweat, the luminol pills in the little round tube, the note book and pencil in case of a night thought worth recording. (Few have been – they generally seem thin in the morning, which does not diminish their force and urgency at night.) 

I turn in, perhaps with a night-cap – I am doing some comparatively scholarly reading for a coincident work so I choose a lighter volume on the subject and read till drowsy on a last cigarette. At the yawning point I snap the book on a marker, the cigarette at the hearth, the button on the lamp. I turn first on the left side, for that, so I’ve heard, slows the heart, and then – coma. 

So far so good. From midnight until two- thirty peace in the room. Then suddenly I am awake, harassed by one of the ills or functions of the body, a too vivid dream, a change in the weather for warm or cold. The adjustment is made quickly, with the vain hope that the continuity of sleep can be preserved, but no – so with a sigh I flip on the light, take a minute pill of luminol and reopen my book. 

The real night, the darkest hour, has begun. I am too tired to read unless I get myself a drink and hence feel bad next day – so I get up and walk. […] 

Back again now to the rear porch, and conditioned by intense fatigue of mind and perverse alertness of the nervous system – like a broken-stringed bow upon a throbbing fiddle – I see the real horror develop over the roof-tops, and in the strident horns of night- owl taxis and the shrill monody of revelers’ arrival over the way. 

Horror and waste – – Waste and horror – what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash. I need not have hurt her like that. Nor said this to him. Nor broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable 

The horror has come now like a storm – what if this night prefigured the night after death – what if all thereafter was an eternal quivering on the edge of an abyss, with everything base and vicious in oneself urging one forward and the baseness and viciousness of the world just ahead. No choice, no road, no hope – only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic. Or to stand forever, perhaps, on the threshold of life unable to pass it and return to it. 

I am a ghost now as the clock strikes four. On the side of the bed I put my head in my hands. Then silence, silence – and suddenly – or so it seems in retrospect – suddenly I am asleep. 

Sleep – real sleep, the dear, the cherished one, the lullaby. So deep and warm the bed and the pillow enfolding me, letting me sink into peace, nothingness – my dreams now, after the catharsis of the dark hours, are of young and lovely people doing young, lovely things, the girls I knew once, with big brown eyes, real yellow hair. […] 

Irresistible, iridescent – here is Aurora – here is another day. 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 

1. Reread the first paragraph. What might be different about each person’s insomnia? What might be similar enough that the narrator can make generalizations, or hope that readers might recognize their own insomnia in his (as he seems to have with Hemingway’s Now I Lay Me)? 

2. Why does the mosquito disrupt the narrator’s ability to sleep? Why has the effect of that night lasted? 

3. What might it mean for the narrator to regret having “broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable”? 

4. What kind of relationship does the narrator seem to have to sleep? What kind of promise does it have for him? What does he crave about it? 

5. Drinking comes up here in an interesting context. Where is it? What does he use it for? 

6. Why might this story be relevant to the process of addiction and recovery? Is insomnia similar to addiction, or potentially connected?

Poetry

https://poemanalysis.com/poetic-form/

https://wordwool.com/types-of-poems/

Dream Database

https://sleepanddreamdatabase.org/

Walrus

 https://thewalrus.ca/bibliotherapy/

Bibliotherapy is a therapeutic practice that uses literature to help individuals cope with life challenges and mental distress. It is divided into clinical bibliotherapy, conducted by certified therapists, and nonclinical bibliotherapy, often facilitated by librarians. Proponents and cognitive science research suggest that fiction allows readers to objectively process their emotions by identifying with characters, potentially increasing empathy and reducing stress. While the practice has a long history dating back to eighteenth-century asylums and is more widespread in the UK, it remains a niche field in Canada, where there is no formal licensing organization. Practitioners like Hoi Cheu use tailored reading lists to create a "cocooned space" for clients, such as Anne Boulton, to explore personal issues more gently than in traditional therapy.

Caitlin R. Kiernan LiveJournal

https://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com

Kiernan

Neuroscience of Reading

 

https://files.blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/5209/files/2017/01/Armstrong-How-Literature-Plays-with-the-Brain.pdf

Neuroscience and Arts

https://www.brainfacts.org/neuroscience-in-society/the-arts-and-the-brain

Feminist Fiction Recommended Titles (in process)

Woman on the Edge of Time Small Changes City of Darkness, City of Light Sex Wars Native Tongue Female Man Golden Notebook Memoirs of a Survivor Briefing for a Descent Into Hell Handmaid's Tale Edible Woman Surfacing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Temple of My Familiar Mists of Avalon Joy Luck Club Woman Warrior Red Tent Orlando Room of One's Own Kindred Parable of the Sower Wide Sargasso Sea Gate to Women's Country Middlemarch Fear of Flying Clan of the Cave Bear Fingersmith Tipping the Velvet Foxfire Girl, Interrupted Delta of Venus Diviners Stone Angel Fire-Dwellers Devil's Arithmetic Diamond Age As We Are Now Bellwether Red Azalea Fight Night

Alan Watts Out of Your Mind

You are continuous with the universe.

This moment is eternity.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcPWU59Luoc

Poetic Forms

https://wordwool.com/types-of-poems/

books that changed my life: in progress

Reading the Book that Changed My Life: 71 remarkable writers celebrate the books that matter most to them,

Has inspired this beginning of a list:

1. At 9, not the first adult novel I had read, but the first from the adult section in the public library, for which I was reprimanded when I was hungry and clueless enough to ask the librarian where I would find more books by Margaret Mitchell.

2. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

At 18, opened up the world in a way that travel up, until this point, had only imagined. I have read all of Hesse since then and yet they all remain part and parcel of that one thin paperback novel.

3. At 13 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte indirectly addressed the idea that one's passion may not be one's destiny. Choice comes into play even when every hormone in the body screams otherwise. Letting the tall, dark and handsome, broody one get away is often the only way to keep what's you for yourself. Controlled passion became a theme throughout my teen years to which I adhered somewhat successfully to greater and lesser degrees, and now largely defines my sexuality.

4. Virginia Woolf's ORLANDO redefined social expectations in my 20's when I realized that the hardcore feminists, who had insisted I must be a lesbian to be a feminist, were self-serving  in their proclamation. Loving the male and female parts of myself equally, for different reasons, was part of loving myself, regardless of the social pressures from either side of the divide to affix a label.

5. In my 30's it was Joseph Gold's READ FOR YOUR LIFE that gave my reading purpose. I learned with great disappointment that Reader Response Theory had gone out of fashion by the time I was studying literature at university, but without calling it that, Gold's book was a master's class in the process of reading as a form of self-analysis to which I continue to adhere.

6. Though introduced to scifi in my 30's by DUNE and Delaney, it wasn't until my 40's that I really acknowledged genre fiction as literary. ISLAND by Huxley was the clincher and so many others many others now besides. Margaret Atwood's SURFACING had made an earlier impression but HANDMAID'S TALE was next level.

5. By my 50's, I was a librarian and THE DIAMOND AGE by Neal Stephenson gave me glimpse into a new world of information rich living. Suzette Hagen Elgin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Tongue_(Elgin_novel)

6. My 60's turned the tables and writing became part of my reading experience to a much greater degree. Journals and memoirs became sources of information pointing me back to my 20's when I first encountered Doris Lessing and Ana's Nin, my 30's with Marge Piercy. Re-Discovering Octavia E. Butler, having read her vampire series earlier but re-visiting her Cassandra-like vision of 2024 in the Parable series.

Positivity Meter

Perhaps a useful tool for determining if your self-prescribed bibliotherapy is working :) http://www.positivityratio.com/single.php https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/are_you_getting_enough_positivity_in_your_diet Now one interesting fact about all living things is that scientists estimate that, on average, we replace one percent of our cells each day. That’s another one percent tomorrow, about 30 percent by next month, and by next season, 100 percent of our cells from today—that’s one way of looking at it. So maybe it’s no coincidence that it takes three months or so to learn a new habit or to make a lifestyle change; maybe we need to be teaching our new cells because we can’t teach an old cell new tricks. We’ve concluded that a ratio of at least three-to-one—three positive emotions for every negative emotion—serves as a tipping point, which will help determine whether you languish in life, barely holding on, or flourish, living a life ripe with possibility, remarkably resilient to hard times. Ratios of about two-to-one are what most of us experience on a daily basis; people who suffer from depression and other emotional disorders are down near one-to-one or lower. If you make your motto, “Be positive,” that will actually backfire. It leads to a toxic insincerity that’s shown to be corrosive to our own bodies, to our own cardiovascular system. It’s toxic for our relationships with other people.