The library of Pharaoh Ramesses II is said to have borne the inscription “the house of healing for the soul”. Dylan Thomas reportedly liked to relax by reading Agatha Christie while he sucked sweets in the bathtub. The novelist Yiyun Li turns to War and Peace in the toughest times; when she launched a virtual reading group on Tolstoy’s masterpiece in lockdown, 3,000 people signed up.
In recent years, a growing body of research has backed up what we know intuitively: that books not only entertain and educate, but can also help us to recover and grow. They offer companionship to the lonely, insight to the anxious, and release to those who feel trapped.
This is the impulse that has stirred Ann Cleeves, creator of the fictional detectives Vera and Jimmy Perez, to co-sponsor a bibliotherapy scheme in the north-east, working with public health teams. Doctors, community workers and others will be able to refer individuals struggling with chronic pain, mental health problems and loneliness to five reading coaches.
Bibliotherapy often refers to the use of texts that are directly relevant to the patient’s condition; Book Prescription Wales, for example, lends high-quality self-help titles to people with problems including stress and anger. A review of several studies found such schemes have a long-term effect in reducing depression, and National Institute for Clinical Excellence guidelines recommend it as a possible treatment.
But Cleeves has a broader ideal in mind. Writing for the Guardian, she described how reading and writing fiction when her late husband was recovering from a psychotic episode helped her to understand her own response and allowed her to escape into a different world. The reading coaches will match their patients with poetry and novels as well as non-fiction, and will introduce them to librarians and other readers. Books offer us a way back to people as well as a retreat from them; studies have suggested that regular readers of fiction are more able to empathise with others.
Library services will be under renewed pressure as local authorities struggle to balance their budgets, and Cleeves notes that a similar project in West Yorkshire several years ago was scrapped due to cost cutting. But at a time when so many are vulnerable, this scheme is needed more than ever, and is worthy of emulation.
Of course, what is uplifting to one reader will seem tooth-rottingly twee to another; what one finds unapproachably grim may be reassuring to the next. Last year, Charlie Mackesy’s illustrated fable The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse became a surprise bestseller, and it returned to the top of the book charts during the pandemic. But sales of The Plague and The Decameron soared too, as people sought to make sense of a new world. Some may respond to the children’s classic The Secret Garden, a tale of healing. Others will recognise themselves in Karl Ove Knausgård or Toni Morrison’s novels. The task for the reading coaches will be to figure out who needs WG Sebald and who requires PG Wodehouse; who will find themselves in the pages of Queenie and who will prefer King Lear – or, indeed, an account of Ramesses II’s world. An ancient idea has found fresh resonance.
