Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System
by Joseph Gold
Category: Literary Criticism

Both a psychological self-help book and a testimonial to reading, Read For Your Life combines bibliotherapy with an almost encyclopedic range of popular and scholarly literature. Although by no means an anthology, this book offers numerous quotations from, as well as explained allusions to, an astonishing range of books, from Shakespeare to Stephen King. F.Scott Fitzgerald to Erica Jong, Henry James to Judy Blume. Read For Your Life is a popular, even a populist book - energetic, colloquial, anecdotal, confessional and inspirational. It includes sections on reading for children, adolescents and the elderly; as well as reading during times of crisis, such as bereavement, divorce, and aging; reading for women, for those with disabilities and for racial minorities.