Reading List
Oliver James
Clinical Psychologist, Writer and Broadcaster
Oliver James is a British clinical psychologist, writer and television producer. His books argue that early care and the pressures of consumer society shape our mental health. They F*** You Up looks at how family life forms personality, Affluenza and The Selfish Capitalist link materialism and free-market politics to rising distress, and Britain on the Couch asks why a richer country grew unhappier. Later books include How Not to F*** Them Up, Office Politics and Not in Your Genes.
01
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Mother’s Milk
by Edward St Aubyn · Fiction
“Mother’s Milk, I suppose, is about the difficulties for mothers of providing good care for babies and small children in a societies where mothering has the status slightly less than that of a street sweeper. At the same time it shows that if the care you received when you were young was unresponsive it leaves you feeling very empty and dissatisfied and emotionally deprived and makes it hard for you to relate well to partners.” — via Interview, July 2010
02
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
by Leo Tolstoy · Classics
“It describes how easy it is to go through life, in the same way as Eliot describes in ‘Prufrock’, trying to please everyone and to be a good person, to conform, without really having any authentic intimacy with anyone. And the great importance really of waking up and smelling the coffee and seeing that the superficial things in life really are superficial and that what actually matters is how you conduct yourself in your relationships with your intimates.” — via Interview, July 2010
03
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False Self
by Linda Hopkins
“Well I think it’s an extraordinary book. It’s essentially a biography of a psychoanalyst who was famous in the 60s and 70s called Masud Khan.” — via Interview, July 2010
04
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This Bleeding City
by Alex Preston · Fiction
“This is by a banker who is an English literature graduate and has the narrative here that shows what it was like to be in the thick of it, on the frontline, during the credit crunch, what it was like on the inside. But, more than that, it’s a good book because it’s a real proper novel.” — via Interview, July 2010
05
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The Challenge of Affluence
by Avner Offer
“He provides specific details of how Thatcherism and Reaganomics in America smashed the family to pieces. What I was talking about earlier, the disinvestment in the domestic household economy, he provides all the evidence.” — via Interview, July 2010
