Here are five books about loss recommended by the website http://www.fivebooks.com/. This site interviews experts in various fields and asks them to recommend books that would be most beneficial to lay people about the subject matter at hand. The five books is a compilation of the recommendations.
Catullus: The Complete Poems, Catullus, translated by Guy Lee
In Catullus’s series of poems to Lesbia we have for the first time in literature the sense of the arc of a relationship. There’s the tingling sense of desire, and then the gloriously happy, loved-up phase. And then there are poems that put a knife through your heart when she’s been unfaithful to him. And angry, brutal poems about his sense of loss, descriptions of how he doesn’t believe he can ever love again, or even go on living at all.
A Question of Trust: the Reith Lectures, 2002, Onora O’Neill
O’Neill posed questions of such fundamental central importance that haven’t been answered seven years later, and it’s because they haven’t been answered that we have then had the credit crunch, we’ve had the decline of trust in politicians, and, the year after the lectures, we had the Iraq war which is the biggest single cause of loss of trust in government.
All the Pretty Horses , Cormac McCarthy
There’s something absolutely thrilling about McCarthy’s lack of inflection because it allows the words to do all the work and therefore anything horrific that happens happens without any sentimentality or manipulation or emphasis. It all happens in your head. The book really mixes up loss and gain and wisdom and sorrow, and it ends with a sense of potential for John Grady, which is based on the wisdom he’s gained on the way.
From Wood to Ridge: Collected Poems in Gaelic and English, Sorley MacLean
Contemporary Gaelic poetry from Sorley MacLean. The poem is an evocation of the people of Hallaig, a township that was completely cleared in the early 1850s, with most of the inhabitants shipped to Australia. It’s not only about the awful things which happened to so many people all those years ago, but also the sense of loss in terms of what Scotland might be today had the clearances not taken place.
Attachment, John Bowlby
Bowlby’s theory of attachment, first published in the 1950s, was a very simple but powerful idea. In essence, he told us something that we all knew, which was that the bond between a parent and a child is really important. He was working at the Tavistock Clinic in London with children who hadn’t had the luxury of strong relationships with their parents. Many had been brought up in a children’s home, and many had developed delinquency or other problems by their teens.
