You’ve heard that old saying, you are what you eat. In other words, you are a product of what you consume. Okay, so in its literal sense, it’s talking about food, but what about books? When we read a book, does it have the ability to shape how we think? How we feel? In other words, can it change us?
Of course books have that kind of power. Books can change lives. Books can save lives. Books can open eyes and minds. But what I want to talk about is how the books we read reflect our mood and feed our mood, and ultimately can change our mood.
Yes, books are a drug in that respect. They’re medicine. At least for me. The pandemic has taken a toll on most people’s mental health, and I’m no different. And not just the pandemic, but the Trump-inspired nonsense down south, the residential school saga, the racist mass killing in London, Ont. It’s been a tough fifteen months. No, make that a shitty fifteen months.
During this time of languishing and stress, are books a lifeline for you? Did you read for distraction? Did you read books to lighten your mood or did you read books that were more aligned with your dark thoughts and the world’s realities?
When I look back at the last few books I’ve read, there’s an obvious pattern: grim non-fiction, then uplifting fiction, and so forth. For me, when the world is in a difficult state, I find myself absorbing that mood and doing a deep dive into the issues as part of my desire to understand what is happening. Those kinds of books seem to reaffirm the hopelessness I’m feeling. And that’s not really a good thing.
For instance, I recently finished reading “The Light of Days” by Judy Batalion. It’s an excellently researched and very well written book about the Jewish women’s resistance movement in Poland during the Second World War. Emotionally though, it’s one of the toughest books I’ve ever read. Here’s a horrid example from its pages:
“Suddenly, a sickening scream. A German grabbed a baby from its mother’s arms, held it by its feet, and bashed its head against a brick wall, breaking the baby’s skull in two. Blood was splattered all over the building, the sidewalk. He threw the baby’s corpse to the ground. The sight haunted Renia for the rest of her life.”
There were days where I could only read a few pages of this book, where the descriptions of such inhumane and graphically tragic events were too much for my psyche. I wondered, how can people survive such astonishing and abhorrent events? Such evil treatment? How do we, collectively speaking, move on from despicable circumstances? How do we heal?
There are answers, and they lie in the example of how others have picked up scattered pieces, or had no pieces whatsoever to pick up, and somehow managed to survive and to keep moving forward. To save myself, I move onto much lighter reading after a heavy book. On the heels of “The Light of Days” I’m now reading “Written in the Stars,” a rom-com that recently won a Lambda Literary award. It’s funny, cute, sweet, silly and, ultimately, useless as anything but light entertainment.
But you know what? There’s a place for light entertainment. It’s not the place I want to be in all of the time (it feels a bit too much like hiding from reality), but it’s a very good place to retreat to when life is beating you down. So what if my romance novels aren’t educational, aren’t literary masterpieces? They make me feel better; they’re sugar for my soul.
How do you manage your book reading in times of trouble?
