Let’s Talk Bookish is a monthly bookish discussion meme created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits and Dini @ Dinipandareads! It’s recently moved to this lower-frequency posting schedule which you can check out here.

August’s prompt is about books and mental health, and I’m posting it a day late because of the issue where I can’t schedule posts, ugh! Anyway, here’s the prompt:

Are there any books that have helped you during a difficult moment in your life? What books would you deem a must-read-must-have when it comes to mental health awareness? What are your favorite book/s that feature a main character going through a rough patch?

Books in general are really important to my mental health. I do better when I make plenty of time to read, and I read more when I’m doing better — it’s one of those virtuous cycles.

I don’t read self-help (in general, there’s been one or two) and the like, but I do have a fiction book that has been an important part of figuring out how to deal with my anxiety better. The first trigger was an article or blog post that I’ve never found again which says the opposite of anxiety is curiosity: anxiety makes you scared, makes you close up, makes you run away, while curiosity is all about being open to something, learning more about it, sitting with it.

At some point, I made a connection with Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. While Ged fears and runs from the monster that his shadow has become, he’s mastered by it; once he turns and seeks it out, seeks to embrace it, it can no longer harm him — more than that, it makes him incredibly powerful.

Reading that as a metaphor for mental health… welp.

I don’t really have any recommendations for books that feature characters going through mental health struggles, though I did recently read Cassandra Khaw’s Find Me Where It Ends, which is both literally and figuratively and at pretty much every level you can think of about suicide. It’s a rough read, and one I found it hard to read as a result, but it’s beautifully written and I do recommend it if that’s the kind of narrative you’re looking for/enjoy. It’s out in October, if I remember rightly.

Of my other recent reads, there is of course Mistakenly Saving the Villain, which involves Yue Wuhuan dealing with severe trauma and what seems like OCD. I… would not recommend it as a serious book about mental health, since it’s a fantasy romance (specifically danmei, so in translation) and Song Qingshi (Yue Wuhuan’s saviour and love interest) absolutely enables him — if anything it’s more of a “what not to do”! But I’ve been having a lot of fun with it: despite the darkness of Yue Wuhuan’s past, most of it is surprisingly light.