Dear Bibliotherapist,
I’m about to go camping for a week with my partner, and I’ve always loved the idea of reading stories around the fire in the middle of nowhere. My Dad used to read Sherlock Holmes to us when we were kids, out under the stars, and these are some of my happiest memories. What can you suggest that I can read in the gloaming, under British summer skies?
Dear Camper,
Few things can be more idyllic than reading aloud with your partner, and I suggest that you take a few different genres with you so that you can dip between ghostly tales and urban imaginings that you can chuckle over from your canvas haven. Perfect for candle-lit twilight, The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges is a delight. Borges collects these 116 imagined creatures from various mythologies and writers, from ancient times to the twentieth century. He describes fantastical beasts from Kafka, C. S. Lewis and H. G. Wells, as well as Pliny, the Eddas and Ovid. These are descriptive narratives purporting to be scientific truths, with wonderful illustrations by Peter Sis, and they will send you on flights on fantasy about what might be lurking outside your tent.
As a little light relief from these potentially alarming mythological fantasies, take it in turns to read tales from Miranda July’s collection, Nobody Belongs Here More Than You. You will find these alternately shocking, surprising, erotic, hilarious and always unexpected. The voice changes from tale to tale, but the narrator is mainly a single woman looking for love in one form or another. “The Swim Team” would be my recommended first read from the collection, telling the curious tale of a swimming instructor who conducts her lessons in her kitchen, with the swimmers practising on her floor with their faces in bowls of water.
Now you could move on to some seriously scary fun with the Collected Ghost Stories of MR James. Montague Rhodes James was a distinguished scholar, and a master of the English ghost story. Educated at Eton, he became Provost of King's College, Cambridge. His scholarly background gives his ghostly reveries an authority that is hard to ignore; the stories were originally written to be read to friends at Christmas, and they have a genuine tendency to lift the tiny hairs along your spine like an icy wind through your tent. Have blankets and cocoa to hand, with a dash of whisky to hand for when you hear whistling…
A perfect antidote to these chillers, The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl will break the spooky spell you will now be under. Dahl is truly the modern master of the form, unsurpassed in his ability to provide the twist in the tale. I read many of his stories as a teenager, and they have lived with me to this day; to hear them read aloud is a great treat. There are always villains in the stories; sometimes they get away scot free with their greed or naked curiosity, sometimes not,they are given an appropriate and satisfying come-uppance. Lamb to the Slaughter is particularly pleasing, but I must reveal nothing of the plot for fear of spoiling the surprise.
Somewhere in your back pack or hamper you must also have a copy of Dan Rhodes' excellent book, Don’t Tell Me The Truth About Love. This is his second collection of stories, after Anthropology, containing more challenging, funny, dark and unsettling stories about love. These will complete your evening under canvas with musings about that great mystery of life, and as long as the midges hold off you will be replete with the bliss of brilliantly told tales read in your own voices.
Ella Berthoud is a bibliotherapist at The School of Life. For more information about the service click here.
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