Take me away from all this: how books save our souls during difficult times

Rachel Krasky has read 95 books this year. That’s about 2.5 a week. The 30-year-old communications manager has always been a voracious reader, but Melbourne’s coronavirus lockdown has given her more time for bingeing on books.

She’s one of many who have turned to reading since Covid struck, seeking to satisfy a need for escape, understanding, hope and communion.

“I’ve been reading a bit of crime, probably more mystery-thrillers than usual, and a lot about relationships,” she says. “And cross-generational books, because I found that there’s a lot in them about people going through difficult times and then coming out the other side – about life struggles really, and how you get through them.”

I hear about Krasky from Jane Turner, owner of Bondi bookshop-cafe Gertrude & Alice, during a bibliotherapy session – a birthday gift from my book club – designed to “cure readers of their literary ailments”.

On a Friday afternoon at the end of a week off, I join Turner and two of her staff, Yehuda Aharon and Ella Sullivan, for wine, cheese and a big old chat about books. We spend over an hour talking about fictional worlds – from an epic of ancient Greek mythology, to a story of shame and desire in modern day South Korea, and the tale of a woman who inherits the unwanted dog of a friend she has lost to suicide.

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Our ages range from 19 to 59, but we chat easily, jumping between genres and sharing the stories we’ve loved and why they spoke to us.

Although I was more focused on the “biblio” part than the “therapy” when I booked the session, I find the whole experience intensely therapeutic. Tucked away in a corner of the store after hours, surrounded by stacked shelves and nourished by delicious food and even better conversation, the pandemic all but fades away.

Afterwards I speak to Sonya Tsakalakis, a former counsellor and professional bibliotherapist, to find out more about the strange alchemy that allows literature to transport us to worlds away from the everyday.

“It has that meditative quality, reading fiction, you just lose sense of time,” she says. “A client calls it a reading trance – you can be on a train and you forget to get off at your stop because you’re so involved in the book.”

Tsakalakis discovered the healing powers of reading as a young migrant child who had a hard time starting out at school: “There was a lot of bullying going on and I understood from an early age how powerful reading can be in offering solace, encouragement and hope.

“It’s really about connecting and that’s what good writing does.”

The observation reminds me of a favourite line from Henry Miller’s Sexus that I’ve carried with me since uni days: “Art isn’t a solo performance; it’s a symphony in the dark with millions of participants and millions of listeners.”

In a global pandemic that has kept us at home, isolated from loved ones, isn’t that just what we need?

Krasky connected to her fellow readers through social media, reaching out to friends to solicit book recommendations at the beginning of the first Melbourne lockdown.

Turner’s son Jordan sent her back a video message with a list. Once she had exhausted it, Jordan introduced Krasky to Turner, who posts the books they decide on to Melbourne. They’ve never met in person but now speak three or four times a week.

Krasky says her reading choices have reflected the ups and downs of pandemic life.

“Sometimes I haven’t been able to pick up those books that are more on the depressing side,” she says. “They’re quite serious and you can get quite emotional … Then there’s been times when I’ve craved that deeper read about people working through their issues because that’s what reflects my journey of coronavirus.”

Tsakalakis has noticed a similar phenomenon in the Zoom workshops she’s run for Melbourne libraries on reading to enhance wellbeing during the pandemic.

“Some people [were] going back to rereading books,” she says. “They’re taking comfort in reading the classics or works they know have given them pleasure before and are guaranteed to give them that same sense of feeling safe.

“Others were saying they needed hopeful reading. And that’s the good thing about reading a work of fiction, it’s that narrative arc … It has the beginning, the middle, and you know [it’s] is going to come to an end with a sense of hope this is not going to last forever.

“And then there are people saying, ‘I just can’t read at all. I can’t concentrate with the endless news cycle.’ They [were trying] short stories, [which] are fantastic if you don’t have that capacity to engage in the long narrative, but you still want to be immersed in a story [with] all the emotions that are stirred up when you’re in a work of fiction.”

I’ve felt these kinds of fluctuations in my own reading. Early on in the pandemic, just as Sydney was heading into lockdown, my book club agreed to become a film club for a while, since none of us could focus.

Then, after stumbling across a New Yorker article about the phenomenon of survivor guilt among mountain climbers, I became overwhelmed with an enormous appetite for tales of Everest – as though my mind wanted to escape into the furthest thing from quarantine I could imagine.

As coronavirus wore on, I recommitted to my love of fiction. Years of immersion in breaking news alerts, the cacophony of Twitter and too many longreads and not enough time to read them had caused the fiction habit that had sustained me since childhood to fall by the wayside. Covid has reawakened it.

My bibliotherapy session ends with a “prescription” and I walk away with a pile of books, from The Overstory by Richard Powers to Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. I plan to prioritise giving myself the time I need to get lost in the narratives – to tap into the vast symphony of humanity contained within their pages.

And what does Tsakalakis prescribe for Covid reading?

“There’s a great short story collection called The Glimpse of Truth, edited by David Miller. It’s a combination of contemporary writers and classic writers … that encompasses all the emotions we’re feeling right now – joy and sorrow and despair.

“Room for a Stranger [is] a beautiful book by Melanie Cheng about [an] intergenerational friendship that develops in this unlikely scenario and … they find a point of connection. So that’s a nice, hopeful sort of story to read.

“Some of the classics are great, like Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. That’s comforting – there’s such a strong sense of place and very evocative images.

“The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is long, it’s circuitous, and it’s filled with intrigue, plot twists and entertainingly wicked characters that will have you turning the pages.

“Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley, is stimulating, colossal and breathtaking. Readers of all tastes will find a poem that will speak to them.

“Reading aloud is quite powerful … It’s nice to bring the story to life if you can read it aloud to someone that you love.”

As for Krasky, she’s revised up the number of books she plans to read this year.

“I wanted to get to 100 because I’ve never done that before, but I’m going to get there,” she says. “Now the sky’s the limit.”