Reading Retreat: The Three Rs

Reading, relaxing and talking about reading

I had been attending bibliotherapy sessions with Nicole Moody at Books on the Hill for around a year when I heard that she was organising a three-night reading retreat at Gladstone’s Library in North Wales. I had been following reading retreats for some time, so I jumped at the chance.

My plan was simple: reading, relaxing and talking about reading — the three Rs.

Naturally, for three nights away, I packed nine books.

I read one.

Books, bibliotherapy and finding different meanings

Nicole is a reader and writer who uses literature creatively. Through poetry, passages from books and plays, we have explored themes such as grief and loss, anxiety, change and transition. She also encourages the bibliotherapy group to bring our own choices of books, poems and writing as ways of expressing something about ourselves.

One of the things I particularly value about the group is that there isn't a right interpretation. We can read exactly the same poem or passage and understand it quite differently. We each bring our own histories, relationships, identities and Social GRACES to what we read. Hearing those different perspectives makes both the text and our understanding of one another richer.

The text doesn't change, but what becomes possible to see within it does.

The road to Gladstone

Four of us travelled together by car to Gladstone’s Library. It was the perfect road trip and, by the time we arrived, the retreat already felt as though it had begun.

And then there was the library itself.

It was magical.

Wood, shelves and old books surrounded us, along with that particular smell of ageing paper and leather bindings. This wasn't a modern hotel that happened to have a lot of books in it. We were staying somewhere built around books, reading and ideas.

At the heart of the library is William Gladstone's own collection. His personal library contained more than 32,000 books, many of which contain his own annotations and marginalia. Today, the wider collection contains more than 150,000 books, journals and pamphlets.

There are two large fireplaces in the Reading Rooms. It was far too warm to need them while we were there, but I could immediately imagine returning in winter and sitting beside one with a book while it was cold outside.

I think I may already have planned my return at that point.

The history of Gladstone and his family is more complicated than the beauty of the library might initially suggest. His father, John Gladstone, owned plantations in the Caribbean where hundreds of enslaved people were forced to work. As a young politician, William Gladstone defended his father's interests and argued for gradual rather than immediate emancipation. His views changed significantly during his lifetime. By 1850, speaking in Parliament, he described “the slave trade to be by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind.” The Library today holds material relating to enslavement and the Gladstone family's connections with plantations in the Caribbean. I think that history is important to acknowledge in a place where the past is quite literally sitting on the shelves.

Nine books and The Hearing Trumpet

Of the nine books I optimistically brought with me, the one I actually read was Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet.

It's a surreal, funny and anarchic novel centred on 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, whose family sends her to a very peculiar institution for older women. A story about an older woman, ageing, power and society turned out to be rather wonderful company for a group of women spending a few days together surrounded by books.

But perhaps the fact that I read only one of my nine books is important.

The retreat wasn't about achieving reading.

There was no target. No number of pages I needed to complete. Nobody was going to assess whether I'd used my reading-retreat time efficiently.

I could simply read.

Or stop reading.

Or talk about reading.

Why reading matters

Perhaps there is something slightly ironic about deliberately allowing reading to achieve absolutely nothing, because research suggests that many of us experience reading as restorative in itself.

The evidence

In the 2016 Rest Test, Claudia Hammond and Gemma Lewis report findings from an international survey involving more than 18,000 people from 134 countries. Participants were asked which activities they found most restful. Reading came out on top, ahead of activities including being in the natural environment, listening to music and doing nothing in particular. Hammond and Lewis are careful to describe this as what people experience as restful rather than evidence that reading is objectively the most restful activity.

There is something I like about that finding. Reading asks us to pay attention, yet many of us experience that attention as restful. For a while, our focus can move away from the demands and preoccupations of our own lives and towards another world, another person's experience or simply the words on the page.

Reading fiction may also offer opportunities to practise seeing the world from another person's perspective. Claudia Hammond describes how, when we become absorbed in a story, we use what psychologists call ‘theory of mind’ — imagining characters' thoughts, feelings and motivations. Research has found associations between reading fiction and interpersonal sensitivity and empathy, although Hammond also cautions against assuming a simple cause-and-effect relationship: perhaps people who are already more empathic are also more likely to read fiction. I recognise something similar in my work as a therapist. Different experiences can sit alongside one another without one having to become the ‘right’ version. Becoming curious about another person's perspective doesn't mean giving up our own; sometimes it simply allows us to see something that wasn't visible before.

That particularly interests me because it brings me back to what I value about bibliotherapy. Reading gives us opportunities to enter experiences that aren't our own. And when we talk about what we've read, another layer appears: we discover what somebody else saw in exactly the same words.

A solitary activity?

Perhaps reading isn't quite as solitary as it first appears.

A slower pace

Whatever the research says about the benefits of reading, I could feel the effect of those three days myself.

My jaw relaxed.

My shoulders dropped.

The thoughts that can fly around my brain began to settle.

There was nowhere else I needed to be and nothing particularly productive I needed to achieve. Even something I love doing hadn't become another item on a list.

The retreat also solidified friendships that had begun through bibliotherapy. We already shared a love of books, but spending three nights together — reading, talking, laughing and simply being in one another's company — added something to those relationships.

I came home with an even greater love of books, bibliotherapy and the friendships that can grow around both.

Making space for what we value

But I don't think everyone needs to go on a reading retreat.

And I certainly don't think everyone needs to love books as much as I do.

Reading happens to be one of the activities I value. For someone else it might be gardening, walking, music, sewing, cooking, being outdoors, making something, spending time with people they love — or something completely different.

Perhaps what mattered wasn't simply that I had made time to read. It was that, for three days, I had made space for something I value without needing to justify that time by being productive.

We can become very good at making room for the things we have to do. It can be harder to protect time for the things that matter to us simply because they bring pleasure, connection, curiosity or meaning.

My reading retreat reminded me what can happen when we do.

And I read one of my nine books.

Perhaps that was the real pleasure of my three Rs:

Reading. Relaxing. And talking about reading.

Nine books optional. 📚