Reading: Therapy or Hazard?

Ceridwen Dovey wrote an article titled “Can Reading Make You Happier?”. It all started off because she was gifted a “remote session with a bibliotherapist”. Biblio-what?

“Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.”

She’s not kidding:

“Today, bibliotherapy takes many different forms, from literature courses run for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people suffering from dementia.”

Some studies claim reading increases empathy, thus making you a better person. Other studies claim that:

“Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers.”

Even if you feel that calling books therapeutic is going too far, you’d find it hard to see how a kid reading books in her school bus could be “harmful to other kids”, right? And yet, for that very reason, an 8 year old in Canada was told to stop reading on her school bus!

Jeremy Blachman wrote a very sarcastic and funny article based on that incident. He cites the risk due to the paper used in books!

“Paper is the most common source of bacteria, according to something I’m sure I would have read if I wasn’t so concerned about my health.  You don’t know who touched a book before you, and what germs they’re spreading.  You know the kinds of people who spend time in bookstores — either reckless, risk-taking individuals, the type you certainly wouldn’t want influencing your children, or, even worse, the grimy and diseased, who hole up and read in the aisles, infecting everyone who comes their way.”

An idea. A few come up with one; the rest read about it and then…start wars:

“Every war since the printing press was invented — by the dreaded Gutenberg Killer –started because someone read something, or at least that sounds plausible enough given that I’m too frightened to try to read a history book.  “War and Peace?”  That’s the name of a book, I think.  And I bet it’s mostly about the war part.”

Even proverbs warn us about this danger:

“And “the pen is mightier than the sword?”  That’s a pretty powerful statement about the danger lurking in the written word, to say nothing of the read word.”

And so Blachman ends with the following line:

“Read more from Jeremy Blachman at– wait, actually, you probably shouldn’t.”