Daily Mail books columnist Daisy Goodwin has written an article recommending books to help cure or prevent alcoholism. Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is recommended for its warning about the evil effects of the disease on those other than the drinker:
…for a sobering account of the misery an alcoholic can wreak on those around them, it’s worth reading Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. The book charts the Oxford friendship between Charles Ryder and aristocratic Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian appears to have everything — looks, charm, position — but he cannot stop drinking. Slowly he loses everything he loves and ends up broken in mind and spirit. I have read this book many times and on each occasion I long to pick up Sebastian and shake him into sobriety, but as the book makes clear so elegantly, alcoholism is not so easily dealt with.
Other books recommended are Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (for curative description of a hangover) and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary (for how drink can ruin one’s social life).
