I’m trying to kick my book habit

One of the last books I read in 2020 was Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. This is a wonderful combination of a memoir of working with some of the most deprived addicts in Vancouver, a study of the neuroscience behind addiction, and a plea for a more enlightened treatment of addicts. It is a book both harrowing and hopeful.

The book addresses not only addictions to substances but also behavioural addictions. And it is with reference to that latter that Maté can bring his own experience to the party. He shares the effects of his own addiction on his life and family. Compared to the crack addict with life-threatening illnesses as result of the drugs, Maté’s labelling of his compulsion to buy classical music CDs an addiction can seem at first both frivolous and bordering on the insulting. Maté himself is unwilling at first to call it an addiction but as he works with the addicts at his clinic over the years and comes to understand the motives, the outcomes, and the patterns of addiction, he is able to apply the label with less and less embarrassment and more and more justification.

I recognised this addiction of Maté’s for two reasons. First, my late father-in-law had exactly the same compulsion — both for vinyl and CDs. John stretched his compulsion to cover jazz as well as classical music but the pattern was the same. I remember when I was based in…