Reading for Personal Development

This is the first book of a subseries included in Bibliotreatment. Reading is therapeutic, and many of the issues that may be worrying you have been broached by great writers whose insight sometimes makes you wonder whether you/ someone you know have been spied on to provide literary material. 

Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, reading is not a passive but an extremely demanding interactive process. It “involves mental activity, is embedded in other communication abilities, and converts graphic stimuli into meaning.” Moreover, fiction works pose very real challenges. You need to pierce through the level of the enunciated (the actual words used and their arrangement in sentences) to reach the level of enunciation (to put it simply, what lies behind the words; what the author conveys even when she is not aware of actually having meant what seems patent to you.) Between-the-lines reading is a fascinating exercise in detection, association, comparison, identification, debate, and much more. 

Active reading, the only way to really profit from books, is reflected in notes pencilled on the margins, highlighted phrases or passages, question and exclamation marks, crosses, and the like. Nothing can be more wrong than to think that a book is a “valuable”, a “sacred” object that must be preserved intact. Books call for intervention, in the same way as some forms of contemporary visual art appropriate an object and make a new imprint on it, thus turning it into a unique object, for every intervention is exclusive and individual. The key, indeed, is appropriation. Your copy, your interaction with the story, your conclusions. Books have an ending, but are not truly finished until readers reinterpret and actualize them. Enjoy your trip along these pages. 


Marta Merajver-Kurlat is an Argentine author whose attraction to the ways in which mankind tells its own history encouraged her to undertake studies in myth, language, literature, psychology, and psychoanalysis. Accordingly, her novels Just Toss the Ashes, Los gloriosos sesenta y después, and  El tramo final delve into intriguing aspects of human nature. A lecturer in psychoanalytic associations of her country, she first took the challenge of addressing non-specialists in psychological issues in the self-help series entitled Bibliotreatment and released by Jorge Pinto Books Inc. In 2009-2010. Reading for Personal Development complements the series by recommending ten works of fiction of infinite value for the advancement of personal improvement.