Literary Exploration discussion

January's theme will be Mental Illness, so we need some book nominations. Let us know what book you are suggesting.

Rules
* can't nominate your own book
* only one nomination per person
* first 6-8 books will be chosen
* need to tell us why you are suggesting this book
* be respectful of other people's choices

Don't think this has been a previous club read (bookshelf isn't available on the phobe app so can't check) so I would like to nominate the bell jar by Sylvia Plath. I read this during my teenage angst years and remembering identifying with it. Would like to reread it as an adult to see if I still feel the same, be interesting to know if anyone else felt like this.

I would like to nominate The Silver Linings Playbook. I have read the book but have not seen the movie, so I don't know how accurate the movie is to the book. But I enjoyed the novel and definitely it fits this theme.

I nominate Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. From Wikipedia "in 1932, Fitzgerald's wife Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was hospitalized for schizophrenia in Baltimore, Maryland. The author rented the "la Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson to work on this book, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst, and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients." I also saw it listed among the 11 most realistic portrayals of mental illness in novels.

Vikki wrote: "Don't think this has been a previous club read (bookshelf isn't available on the phobe app so can't check) so I would like to nominate the bell jar by Sylvia Plath. I read this during my teenage an..."

We did do The Bell Jar last year, can I get another nomination from you.

An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. I bought it last week and can't wait to get started on it. The author had manic depression while studying medicine so manic depression is seen from the doctors perspective as well as the patient.
I'm a psychology graduate and a recovered suffer of depression this topic is really interesting for me, glad to see it on here.

I second Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Kay Redfield Jamison book is... flawed in quite a few respects. Not least of it is that she is highly narcissistic and the book felt to me like a an example of "showing off' and like a romanticization of mania.

Can't do the linky thing because I am on my phone app.

I would like to nominate One Flew over the cuckoos nest by Ken Kessy.

Saw the movie years ago and keep meaning to read the book. Can't remember a lot of the plot now so shouldn't spoil it for me.

Sally906 wrote: "Can't do the linky thing because I am on my phone app.

I would like to nominate One Flew over the cuckoos nest by Ken Kessy.

Saw the movie years ago and keep meaning to read the book. Can't reme..."

Already done that one too Sally, got a second nomination.

I know I'm not active in this group [I joined ages ago because you're always reading books I want to read, but I never actually end up reading them...] but the topic made me think of a brilliant book that you might otherwise not think of, so I hope you'll forgive a relative outsider's suggestion... (and if you end up reading it I might actually be able to join in a discussion here for once!)

I suggest The Affirmation, by Christopher Priest.
It's effectively two intertwined stories in one. I don't want to give away too much of what happens, but essentially they are two alternative stories about the same character - in one story, he's a very troubled man living in England after the War, and in the other story he's a seemingly relatively untroubled man on an ocean cruise in a very-near-reality-but-for-one-thing SF setting on a different world.

Really, though, it's a story about schizophrenia, and I'd recommend it because it's the most viscerally disturbing, disorienting dive into madness - it made me feel very uncomfortable by the end of it.

Priest's often overlooked, I think, because he comes from inside the SF&F ghetto, but he's a brilliant and imaginative writer (although The Affirmation is mostly written in quite a clean, unflamboyant style). He's best known for 'The Prestige', but 'The Affirmation' is considered by some to be his masterpiece. It's a relatively short book.

So, why read this book?
- it's a powerful depiction of mental illness
- more than that, it's an exploration of human identity, memory, life, death and storytelling
- it's relatively short
- it could serve as an introduction to one of the great modern British authors, who many people still haven't heard of.

Nice one Wastrel, we now have the following;

The Silver Linings Playbook
Tender Is the Night
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
The Affirmation

just looking for a few more before we create the poll

I'm not sure if this exactly qualifies but thinking The Glass Castle..? I believe the mother suffered a mental illness. My original idea was also The Bell Jar.

I would like to nominate An Angel at my Table by Janet Frame. It is an older book and the second in an autobiographical series but it stands alone quite well. I read it years ago before I read the first one and it had a huge impact on me. Janet Frame is a distinguished author from New Zealand who spent a harrowing eight years in horrifically scary psychiatric institutions after being (correctly? incorrectly?) diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Poll is up now https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/1...