Blog — reading deeply

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.

We are living in an age of acceleration: acceleration of technology, of communication, of productivity, of consumption, and of attention. We are on an information treadmill, fed an unlimited diet of notifications, images, headlines, summaries, messages, comments and opinions. This often leaves very limited opportunity for reading and a deeper form of reading. The question, then becomes whether reading still has space to exist as a deep practice, or whether it too is becoming fragmented by the conditions of the world around it. At its shallowest, reading is the simple act of decoding words on a page. At its deepest,...