Reading

by Philip Davis, Fiona Magee

Can reading literature really help our mental health? This book shows how and why - not by instruction or prescription but by emotion and exploration. Offering case histories of individual readers and reading groups based on the work of The Reader, a charity dedicated to bringing serious literature to neglected communities, the authors showcase how a whole new demographic might get into reading, and in doing so unlock the emotional intelligence and benefits to health and wellbeing which come from our access to written human stories and imagined situations.

Genres: Nonfiction

163 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 29, 2020

Reviews

[lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

"We do believe in the books, but that is not because we are elitists who value high art above everything else. It's rather because these books serve to represent the people in the room, expressing what can't always be made out in life itself."

I was so looking forward to this, more than any other Emerald book I've been able to get my hands on, but I was unfortunately disappointed by its limited scope.

I was expecting a more comprehensive analysis of the connections between reading and mental health, but this book is largely confined to the examination of the 'reading group' setting. The authors shared plenty of great stories about how their charity has reached participants and allowed them to deepen their personal lives, but there was little here I found worth applying to my own life as an already active reader and former literature student with no interest in running a reading group.

A chapter on this would have been a lovely addition, but to make it the whole focus of this installment in the series felt like a bit of a waste.