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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.

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.

Who Gets to Belong? A View from Literature

Reading Masud Husain's Our Brains, Our Selves alongside Rami Kaminski's The Gift of Not Belonging over the last couple of weeks, and they bring a fascinating tension to the concept of human belonging.

One is about people who lose the ability to belong when the brain changes and how quickly the world withdraws recognition when someone becomes unfamiliar. The other is about people who never felt the pull of the group in the first place and dares to call that a gift rather than a flaw.

Between Brontë's attic, Plath's bell jar, and Ishiguro's buttoned-up butler, literature has been asking this question for centuries: who gets to belong, who decides and why do some of us opt out.

Read this exploration on my latest Substack essay - link in bio or here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/bibliotherapywithbijal/p/who-gets-to-belong-a-view-from-literature

Summer reading lists or the best books of the year have been popping up everywhere! And of course the novelty factor that they evoke, hooks readers’ curiosity. Popping up with the same bright insistence: beach reads, page-turners, summer thrillers, romantasy, self-improvement titles, books to pack, books to finish before the season ends, the summer reading challenges.

Today I wanted to devote space to the literature that some of us might need to restore ourselves from what has been an insane first half of the year. I know many of us have been feeling overwhelmed with the sheer pace of news, technology, AI and just how fast our world seems to be changing overnight.

In true bibliotherapeutic style, if I can call call it that, inspired by the third section of my book, Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading, titled “The Art of Literary Curation”, I invite you to be wholly intentional about what you read, focusing on what I call restorative reading. Reading that replenishes us, offering us a capacity to inhabit it: to stare at the sea, to eat peaches, to sleep for copious amounts of time at leisure, to find pleasure in the small things, to indulge in comedy. A reminder that the world is more than work, crisis, and obligation.

A restorative summer reading life

A restorative summer reading life begins with permission: permission to read intentionally; to read at our heart’s desire; to not finish; to reread; to choose a book because the sentences taste of salt, figs, or delicious childhood memories, that indulge us or comfort us like an ocean breeze on a warm summer’s day.

Books that Restore Our Sense of Play and Bring Joy