Good Books for Bad Times
Posted by: Keir
When times are tough, we turn to books for help. In Slate, Erica S. Perl suggests books to read to your children during a financial crisis:
Many of the books I discovered during the late ’70s featured themes of economic hardship that made my circumstances seem manageable by comparison—a happy coincidence, I thought at the time. Looking back, I’m not so sure this was an accident. A review of popular American children’s books of the past century reveals a recurring theme in the children’s publishing industry: When times are tough, cue the stories about times that were even tougher.
And, in the Telegraph, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst explains why we should turn to Charles Dickens in hard times:
But there are good reasons why it is Dickens to whom we should now return. The centre around which the Victorian age revolved and Dickens’s combination of ambition and anxiety make him unmistakably our contemporary. And not only can we find parallels in his novels with the current crisis, we can also learn from them how to survive and triumph over it.
October 30th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
[...] of good books for bad times, Gawker looks at authors’Â stock-market speculations–speculative fiction, to be more [...]