Book Therapy

What can books do for us? Is reading useful? Is it therapeutic? Can it make us happy? Can it provide us with the spiritual resources necessary to shield ourselves from adversity? Can literature be prescribed? Does it benefit both body and soul? Science increasingly acknowledges the benefits of books. Studies show that the effects of reading can be equated with those of meditation and medicine. Readers sleep better, they experience lower levels of stress and depression and have higher self-esteem than non-readers. Reading prolongs life and changes us in an essential way; good fiction expands our horizons, it helps us to understand others better, it teaches us empathy. Each chapter of Booktherapy is a formula for getting closer to the authors, the contexts, the fragments and the reflections that have provided Jordi Nadal - author and editor of these and many other pages - with a soothing balm in difficult moments and which have acted as a guide for each important decision. This is a recipe book for living more lives than just our own, and which serves to confirm the validity of Montesquieu's words: "I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve."