Sue Wootton
Save the world? Let’s all start reading again, that’s what I say. Reading a book is an intensely personal activity. It’s just you and the words, make of them what you will. People can tell you what a book means to them, but no one can tell you what it means to you. That’s between you and the book. To find out, you need to come to know the book and your own mind. Those discoveries are generated in the private act of exploration we call reading. To be immersed in a book is to inhabit a creative and enchanted space, which is no bad thing to practice doing in a world that has come to feel distressingly devoid of magic. Because what is magic, if not another word for hope?
Here’s some of the fiction and non-fiction that I especially enjoyed in 2016. One way or another all these books address aspects of health, illness and wellbeing. Most of these titles are fairly recent publications, although I’ve included several older books that were new to me. Perhaps there’s something here to keep you company over the holidays, or better still to place on your bedside table to be part of your new year’s resolution to read for half an hour every night before sleep … to read yourself to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream …
Between 27 January and 18 March 1817, Jane Austen wrote her final, unfinished, novel Sanditon, meaning a town built upon sand. This blistering satiric anatomy links hypochondria, property speculation, and consumerism—invalids seek out seaside resorts, property prices rise, and developers cash in on the new health fads of sea air and sea-bathing. In Sanditon, Austen demonstrates her modernity, her courage, and her worldliness. Yet again.
