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Who can forget the terrible climax of Howards End, when Leonard Bast is killed by a deluge of books? Death by books holds a horrible irony for poor Bast, as he had thought they were his salvation, seeking to escape ‘the abyss’ of poverty by reading Ruskin in the evening and trying to impress the middle-class Schlegel sisters by listing his favourite titles. Try as he might, he can only fail, as E.M. Forster shows books to be extremely treacherous: they don’t save Leonard Bast, they kill him.
The power of books is all too often lauded as a healing force, rather than something potentially lethal. The University of Warwick has just launched a free online course, ‘Reading for Wellbeing’, to explore ‘how poems, plays and novels can help us cope with times of deep emotional strain’.
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