Book Therapy

What can books do for us? Is reading useful? Is it therapeutic? Can

it make us happy? Can it provide us with the spiritual resources

necessary to shield ourselves from adversity? Can literature be

prescribed? Does it benefit both body and soul? Science increasingly

acknowledges the benefits of books. Studies show that the effects

of reading can be equated with those of meditation and medicine.

Readers sleep better, they experience lower levels of stress and

depression and have higher self-esteem than non-readers. Reading

prolongs life and changes us in an essential way; good fiction expands

our horizons, it helps us to understand others better, it teaches us

empathy. Each chapter of Booktherapy is a formula for getting closer

to the authors, the contexts, the fragments and the reflections that

have provided Jordi Nadal - author and editor of these and many

other pages - with a soothing balm in difficult moments and which

have acted as a guide for each important decision. This is a recipe

book for living more lives than just our own, and which serves to

confirm the validity of Montesquieu's words: "I have never known

any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve."

Know how to live before dying, Mitch Albom

A stoic emperor as an admirable life model,

Marcus Aurelius

The value of compromise, Albert Camus

A sword against vanity, Elias Canetti

He explained almost everything about the human condition,

Anton Chekhov

The union of the sacred and the human,

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Two thousand brilliant pages, like its elusive author,

Elena Ferrante

The meaning (of life) is a choice, Viktor Frankl

Our own wings, André Gide

When childhood is your strength, Natalia Ginzburg

The tenderness of a hard heart, Patricia Highsmith

The finest journalism of the 20th century,

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Let time build solid castles with what looked like sand,

Hiromi Kawakami

The sharp-edged word of bright pessimism,

François deLa Rochefoucauld

Of rural life, simple and authentic, to the most elevated

and sublime, Selma Lagerlöf

We read so that we know we are not alone, C. S. Lewis

Two volcanoes of passion in mourning, Rosa Montero

There are no obstacles to intelligence,

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A harsh and corrosive vision of the world of work in Japan,

Amélie Nothomb

The value of hope, Octavio Paz

An encounter with spirituality, Jacques Philippe

A perfection in nuances, Josep Pla

An unrivalled story teller, Katherine Anne Porter

See the essential, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

He can break your heart with a sentence, James Salter

Lucidity as a lethal mutation, Miguel Torga

The poet illuminated with immensity, Giuseppe Ungaretti

The infinite pleasure of reading (and the fortune of being

a reader), Irene Vallejo

Reading it will make some women - and many, many brave

and generous men - better understand what it is to be

a woman, Virginia Woolf

Learning that there is more than one wisdom,

Marguerite Yourcenar

To think about what we do with our lives, understanding

our emotions and beliefs, Theodore Zeldin

The return of humanism, Stefan Zweig

The embodiment of wisdom and compassion, The Buddha,

by Agustín Pániker