HOBAR - Reading and Wellbeing Blog

Open University History of Books and Reading (HOBAR) Seminar

'Reading and Wellbeing'

We had just started our annual History of Books and Reading seminar series on the theme of ‘Reading and Wellbeing’when the COVID-19 pandemic broke. In the space of two months, lives have been turned upside down and our most natural instincts suppressed. Pandemic social distancing rules have cut us off from participatory culture, sport and social life, and is causing a surging mental health crisis. Never has reading matter, specifically, having books at home, been of greater importance. Confined to our homes, many have turned to the printed books on our shelves and the eBooks on our digital devices for reassurance, reflection, or escape. Putting this seminar series together in the pre-Coronavirus world, we had never imagined that our research topic would be so close to home for so many people, including ourselves.

This blog series will reflect on the HOBAR seminars, with organisers and speakers considering the relevance of reading and wellbeing in the current pandemic.

• ‘Reading and Wellbeing revisited: surviving the pandemic’, Shafquat Towheed (05/05/20)
• 'Doomscrolling: COVID-19 and Crisis Reading', Edmund King (11/05/20)
• 'Bibliotherapy Lessons from Lockdown', Ella Berthoud (18/05/20)
• 'Books for Travel in a Time of Crisis: the Word Deployed by Ward and Solnit', Sara Haslam (25/05/20)
• 'How I fell back in love with poetry in Lockdown', Sophie Bankes (01/06/20)
• 'Crisis Reading and Letter-Writing in an Eighteenth-Century Smallpox Outbreak: The Case of Elizabeth Robinson Montagu', Jack Orchard (08/06/20)
• 'On re-reading The Plague during lockdown after half a century', Sandip Hazareesingh (15/06/20)
• 'Lost without the library: reading for well-being in the time of lockdown', Liz Brewster (22/06/20)
• 'Reading for wellbeing on board the Torrens', Helen Chambers (29/06/20)
• 'Spenser in the Lockdown: Means of Gladsome Solace?', Richard Danson Brown (06/07/20)
• 'Reading "doing its work"', Josie Billington and Clare Ellis (13/07/20)
• 'Cholera in Middlemarch: George Eliot's Pandemic Writing', Delia da Sousa Correa (07/09/20)
• 'The pleasure of re-reading', Sally Blackburn-Daniels (21/09/20)
• 'Italian literature and pandemics. Part 1: Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi/The Betrothed', Francesca Benatti (28/09/20)
• 'Italian literature and pandemics: Re-reading the Italian classics during COVID-19. Part 2: Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron', Francesca Benatti (12/10/20)
• 'Looking Backward to Look Forward: reading Edward Bellamy during Covid-19', Rajiv Prabhakar (19/10/20)
• 'Such Wonders: Reading Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven in the Time of Covid-19', Sarah Bowers (23/11/20)