Today's podcast comes to you from the sickroom of literature, where centuries of the world's finest books have either been conceived or set.
We meet the poet Sarah Manguso who has written hauntingly about her experience of years of illness. Then it's off to a north London library to join a group of literary enthusiasts, organised by the Reader Organisation, who sing the praises of reading aloud, and to find out how talking literature may help with depression and even dementia. We also hear from a Liverpool academic who has been examining the how Shakespeare's linguistic inventiveness sets neurons alight.
Back in the studio, our panellists enlist the expertise of our Twitter followers in a discussion of the books that can make them feel better and the writers who capture illness best.
Reading list:
The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso (Granta)
My Year Off by Robert McCrum (Picador)
Giving up the Ghost: A memoir by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (HarperPerennial)
Illness as Metaphor, and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag (Penguin Modern Classics)
In the Land of Pain by Alphonse Daudet, translated by Julian Barnes (Cape)
