Blog — summer 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.

With Summer just around the corner, here are this Summer’s most anticipated fiction books. Diverse, eclectic and worldly, if there’s only 6 books you read this summer, make it these. City of Girls (Fiction) by Elizabeth Gilbert City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert From the Eat, Pray, Love lady, comes this enticing book aptly titled City of Girls. A nostalgic tale of an older woman reminiscing her past, specifically her youthful time at the Lily Playhouse, a revue theatre owned by a her eccentric Aunt Peg. Dial back to the summer of 1940. A barely-adult Vivian Morris springs up in the Big Apple with nothing but a sewing...