Blog — Comfort Reads

Reading as an intimate experience. When I was asked to contribute to a Portuguese bibliotherapy journal, I wanted to share something raw and from the heart. I did not want to write only in the capacity of a bibliotherapist, which is the role I usually occupy when thinking about books, healing, and transformation. Instead, I wanted to write as a ‘bibliotherapee’ if I can call it that: as someone who has been captivated by a book, held by a book, and unexpectedly changed by a book. This piece is personal. It is about my own intimate experience with reading, and about the first time I felt a book truly shift something in front of me. Not simply in an intellectual way, and not because I was analysing it through a therapeutic lens, but because something in the text met something in me. It changed the way I was seeing, and perhaps more importantly, it changed the way I understood what it meant to be seen by a book.

Sometimes we all crave a comfort read just to temporarily get us through a challenging situation that is mentally draining. We may want to simply pass time or take a break from a tough day. Other times we need to find hope again and remove ourselves from the despair that clouds us. For me personally there has been a lot of change over the last couple of years with moving countries and having babies. To get me through stressful times and cope with the constant change I went in search for some literary escapism to reaffirm my faith that everything...