The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You Read Online Free Page B

coastal desert at the end of the railway line, on the hunt for a new species of insect. While he searches for invertebrates, he stumbles upon a village hidden among eternally shifting dunes. Here he finds a unique community of people who live in houses nestled at the bottom of holes fifty feet deep in the buff terrain. To prevent their homes from being submerged, the residents must dig bucketfuls of golden dirt every day, which they send up on ropes to the villagers above.
    Their work takes place in the moonlight, as the sun makes their shafts unbearably hot. Jumpei is lured into one of the burrows for the night, where he helps a young widow in the endless battle against the fluid sand. In a twist of fate, Jumpei wakes the next morning to find the ladder that should have been his exit has been removed. His escape attempts are alternately heroic, sadistic, and desperate. Slowly he accepts his fate as one who must work all day, sending buckets of sand up on ropes to helpers above—in between eating, sleeping, and having sex with the widow. By the end of the novel you have shared Jumpei’s humiliation—for the villagers above find his inadvertent life change highly amusing—and his gradual acceptance of his bizarre new existence. And it’s not all bad, for he does make a discovery under the sand.
    Let Jumpei teach you to submit to the unexpected. And once you’ve experienced being hemmed in by imaginary walls of sand, you may be glad to take some tentative steps beyond your own, less imprisoning walls.
    See also:
Anxiety • Loneliness
ALCOHOLISM
    The Shining
    STEPHEN KING
    •   •   •
    Under the Volcano
    MALCOLM LOWRY
    •   •   •
    Once a Runner
    JOHN L. PARKER, JR.
    A lcoholics knock around in the pages of novels like ice cubes in gin. Why? Because alcohol loosens tongues. And because it’s always the old soaks who collar us to tell a tale. When they’re on the page, we can enjoy their ramblings without having to smell their beery breath. But let’s agree to keep them on the page. Nobody wants a real one in their home, and if you find yourself heading that way, we suggest you terrify yourself with a couple of graphic portrayals of bottle-induced ruin. Our cure is to be imbibed in three parts: two heady cocktails that will show you a glimpse of your potential fate to sober yourself up quick smart, followed by an enticing shot that will prompt you to put on your trainers and run yourself into a new, clean life.
    Jack Torrance, the writer in Stephen King’s spine-chilling
The Shining
, has been on the wagon for some years. Though his wife has stayed with him, he lost her trust when he broke his son Danny’s arm in a drink-fueled rage. By working through the winter as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies, he hopes he can reconnect with his wife and now five-year-old son, and get his career back on track by writing a new play.
    The two big obstacles to Jack’s happiness have been an excessive reliance on alcohol and an explosive temper—not a good combination to take to a vast, spooky hotel where you are likely to be cut off from the outside world for several weeks once the snow hits. Jack starts his work in the firm conviction that he will stay sober. But one of the Overlook’s ghostly attributes—apart from architecture that redesigns itself regularly—is an ability to produce cocktails from out of nowhere.
    At first these are merely imaginary, but soon Jack is confronted with a genuine gin served to him by the (deceased) bartender, Lloyd (see: Haunted, being). Looking into the gin is “like drowning” for Jack: the first drink he’s held to his lips in years. In the company of increasingly malign spirits, the specter of Jack’s lurking alcoholism is delighted to break out and let rip. Observing Jack’s disintegration will put the fear of the demon drink into you in more ways than one and will have you heading for the orange juice rather than the hooch.
    Drunks tend to be either