The Emotional Power of Literature and Stories

In a world of constant notifications and competing demands on our attention, many of us feel too busy to read. Yet books and stories offer something increasingly rare – a quiet, immersive space where we can reflect, feel and make sense of our experiences.

In this episode of The Choice Space, Dr Lee David is joined by Dr Charley Baker, Associate Professor of mental health at the University of Nottingham, to explore how literature helps us understand psychological distress, identity and experiences that do not fit neatly into clinical language.

They discuss reading as an active process that can restore energy, broaden perspective and deepen empathy. Stories allow us to encounter complex emotions, stigma and trauma from the inside, in a space that feels safer and more intimate than other media.

The conversation explores how literature can help us find language for difficult experiences, challenge preconceptions and strengthen connection – with others and ourselves. They reflect on the role of fiction in clinical understanding, the value of poetry and shorter forms when concentration is low, and how sharing books can become an act of care that strengthens relationships.

Rather than presenting reading as something we should do, this episode invites a gentler approach – noticing what draws us in, allowing ourselves to stop when a book does not connect, and recognising that stories can meet different needs at different times.

This is a grounded conversation about how literature can support understanding, connection and emotional wellbeing.

Key moments

00:57 Why reading offers a different kind of space in a fast-paced world
02:18 Charley’s journey into literature, mental health and the health humanities
04:18 How stories build empathy and broaden perspective
06:03 Immersion, representation and feeling understood through fiction
10:58 Literature and understanding self-harm
15:11 Finding language for trauma and complex experiences
17:19 Choice Pause – opening space for creativity and curiosity
19:57 Reading as nourishment and active recharge
23:32 Sharing books as connection and enacted kindness
31:07 Listening to our needs and finding our own relationship with reading
33:48 Audiobooks and new ways of accessing stories
39:44 Permission to stop reading what doesn’t connect 

About the guest

Dr Charley Baker is an associate professor of mental health at the University of Nottingham. Her work explores literature, mental health and the health humanities, focusing on how stories support understanding of distress and lived experience. Her clinical interests include domestic abuse, violence against women and girls, self-harm, suicide and OCD, and how narrative approaches can support people experiencing distress.

Instagram: @CharleyBakerTheBookPusher

About the host

Dr Lee David is a GP, CBT therapist and author specialising in mental health and wellbeing. Lee has written many books on CBT, mindfulness and teen wellbeing, and speaks regularly at conferences and in the media. Away from work she enjoys running, hiking, singing in a choir and spending time outdoors with her family. You can find Lee through her website and on Instagram, TikTok (@dr.lee.david), Facebook and LinkedIn.  You can find more about her books, wellbeing courses and therapy here:  https://linktr.ee/dr.lee.david 

Transcript

Charley Baker (00:01)
It is a step beyond simple recognition of the value of stories and the value and the nourishment that we find through books.  

a couple of weeks ago, had this brilliant weekend where I had two great books. And at the end of that weekend, I felt nourished. I felt like I'd had some space for me just to be immersed in books, immersed in literature, immersed in these stories that caught my attention. And it felt like an active process of relaxing.

I felt like I'd restored some of my energy. It felt like a gift. And I really, I love that about literature. I love the way that literature can make us feel as well as the education that can provide us or the understanding it can give us.

Lee (00:57)
Welcome to the Choice Space podcast. I'm Dr. Lee David, GP, author and CBT therapist. In today's episode, we're exploring something that many of us wish we had more time for. Reading. In a world full of social media, emails and constant demands on our attention, books and stories offer a different kind of space. They may bring comfort, clarity or a pause.

yet we often underestimate how much they can support our mental health. FOR many people, reading helps us make sense of difficult emotions, reduces the sense of being alone, or may offer a step back from the intensity of everyday life. Stories can give us language to name experiences that may otherwise be hard to describe and can create connection with ourselves, with others and with characters who may stay with us long after the page is turned. 

Today I'm joined by Dr Charley Baker, Associate Professor of Mental Health at the University of Nottingham, whose research and writing explore how literature can help us understand psychological distress and experiences that don't always fit neatly into clinical language. Charley, welcome. Could you introduce yourself and share what first drew you to literature as a way of understanding wellbeing?

Charley Baker (02:18)
Hi, thanks Lee, my name's Charley Baker. I'm an associate professor, ⁓ at the University of Nottingham. So what drew me to literature and wellbeing? So firstly, as a child, I was a voracious reader and I remember very, very clearly how calming I found books and how I would get stressed if I didn't have books. And both my were very generous in buying me lots and lots of books. I can remember when I was younger, the joy of being able to immerse myself in different stories. 

And then When I was working in a crisis response and home treatment team and writing my PhD on fiction, particularly postmodern fiction and psychosis, a job was advertised at the University of Nottingham that was just the perfect job for me. And the job was to...be the research assistant To explore madness in post-war British and American fiction. So I was paid for three years to read books and it was incredible.

So that resulted in a book and a number of different podcasts and a conference and really launched what we wanted to do at Nottingham around health humanities.

Lee (03:40)
So it sounds like there's a real breadth of the impact of literature and reading for you right across different areas from childhood right the way through your PhD and then into your current role. Let's start with the importance, what it brings to us. So it feels like reading is much more than a form of light It feels like it brings something really important for our mental health, for well-being and for life in general, through your experience of so many different strands of exploring the role of literature and reading, what is it that you feel that it brings?

Charley Baker (04:18)
So I think there's several things that it brings for Putting to one side the joy of reading which is in its own right, a wonderful, wonderful thing. I think there's a couple of key things to me that reading about different people's experiences, can help. So the first one, ⁓ I think, is it helps us to empathise with other people.

whether that's a character in a story who really speaks to us or whether that's somebody who's a peripheral character to a story but who has a particular experience that we can relate to, I i think it helps us to think differently about people's experience and sometimes when we're reading about something that's completely unfamiliar to us it's really got that educational value.

for thinking differently and we're in a world currently where we've never been more divided. I think it helps to bridge that gap. and those gaps are ever increasing so it gives us that real sense of understanding different people's perspectives and understanding different people's point of view, whether we agree with them or otherwise.

Lee (05:33)
Yeah, I love the idea of all of those aspects, learning about different parts of the world. And I certainly for myself, I think I learn more from reading literature around different periods of history, different countries, and different cultures than I would from reading a nonfiction book, because my brain seems to absorb it much more easily when it's set in a literary style.

It's a different way to educate ourselves. It doesn't quite feel like education. It just feels like immersion, doesn't it?

Charley Baker (06:03)
it does and that's the other real benefit I think is that immersion in the other world is so different in a fictional world and I don't even think it needs to be a literary fiction world it can be an accessible book so it might be one of the light reads that we might pick up at an airport for example but it's just something about that immersion and that being in a world where we're seeing things anew and seeing things afresh.

A really good example of that for me recently was Coco Mella's Blue Sisters. It's a wonderful, wonderful novel, but one of the key characters, the sister, has endometriosis. And as a woman with endometriosis, I've never seen that represented in fiction before. And I've never seen such an empathic perspective as well on using pain relief, for example, and where there might be concerns from a medical point of view about the overuse of pain relief versus somebody's quality of life where they're really struggling. And that really, I think, brought home to me exactly what literature can do. It can help us to bridge that gap. 

And I know I recommended it far and wide. ⁓ I know a number of my friends who read it said, I get it now, I get how it feels. And actually that immersion in that world with the three sisters was just a completely different way of understanding and explaining experiences that I could really relate to.

Lee (07:38)
Yeah, that's so powerful. And I'm really thinking about that empathy and how literature is so effective at being able to create that. And I was mulling this over before we recorded today, and I was thinking about the difference, for example, between watching a programme, maybe even watching a movie, and literature and reading. And there is that immersion. And perhaps we're more able to then relate, there's more dialogue about the perspective of others.

And it feels like it's a bit less threatening in some way that we're able to hear it more because sometimes people get quite closed off and they're not as willing to hear things that feel uncomfortable. And I just wondered what you feel helps us break that down because it does encourage listening to one another in a different way, which I think is really important.

Charley Baker (08:27)
Yeah I think it is super important. I think there's something around reading in a book that is so much more intimate than watching on a programme so maybe it's something around the amount of attention we have to pay to be able to immerse ourselves in a book.

there's something about the intimacy of reading, I think, that means can challenge our own preconceptions without that confrontation that you might get when it's a conversation or when it's a TV programme or a radio it's something much more private where we can mull over our beliefs that might feel unusual or that we might worry that we're gonna be perceived differently if we talk about them. It's that kind of safe opportunity in that intimate space, I think. 

And that's certainly something I've talked a lot about in writing about the use of literature in clinical education in particular. So when we look at things like books that have characters who self-harm, for example, self-harm can be incredibly misunderstood by society more broadly and in particular in different clinical settings.

In a book, there's an opportunity to hear and see the person's thoughts so that you can hear and see the things that we otherwise wouldn't be able to get to. And I think understanding more complex or stigmatized issues through different characters' experiences. I really think that's something valuable because it's so much safer to do that through literature than it is to do it in other settings.

Lee (10:12)
and I think there's something about inviting it into us when we read it happens within us, it's in our own space. And so actually, how we approach the content is different, because it feels like we're then experiencing it from within rather than perhaps other forms of entertainment, where it's outside. and so a very interesting dynamic about where we meet some of the content.

I'm really interested in the work you've done around self harm because it's a ⁓ topic which can be very challenging for people. It's very important. We know that many young people affected by self harm and we're wanting to have narratives that support and create understanding. what's your experience about how literature can support in these more complex areas of care?

Charley Baker (10:58)
So I think in relation to self harm and broader mental health and illness, but I'll focus on self harm in particular, There are a number of different things relating to self harm people might feel completely unable to articulate in words verbally what's happening for them internally and we might hear that in reading in a different way. So we might hear in reading how somebody feels ashamed for example by their self-harm and how that is repeated or reinforced with poor experiences of care that they might have or with a dismissal for example of you're just another teenager self-harming.

We don't need to take that seriously. But I think it also gives us a reminder that what we're seeing and what we're hearing is a fraction of what's going on for somebody.

And if we start to think more deeply about how that person is experiencing the world around them and experiencing their emotions, again, I think seeing that in writing is much less confronting than seeing it in a clinical consultation. And it gives us that opportunity to think critically ourselves about what our preconceptions are, what our beliefs are, what might be happening for somebody, the kind of what's the person saying, is going on versus what's actually going on. and if we think about self harm and mental illness as an iceberg, what we see in the clinical encounter is the tip of the iceberg, the visible part, what's happening for the person and what we see replicated in stories, in first person narration, in fiction, what we see is what's underneath the surface and thinking about these experiences that might be underneath the surface in a safe environment, I think gives us ways of responding to people doesn't mean we freeze and it doesn't mean that we put our own defences up.

I think it gives that real deep comprehensive understanding just how different everybody's experiences are too. with self harm, particularly in a clinical or in a friendship or a family setup, our desperation a human being meeting somebody with self harm is often that we want them to stop doing that. want them to not hurt themselves. We want them to be safe. We want them to not feel as terrible as they might be feeling.

And actually reading about self harm gives us the confidence to pause and to be with someone rather than very quickly into a protective mode. It gives us that ability to just sit quietly with someone's distress and say, hear you and I hear what you're trying to say and I'm here and I'm gonna listen. It just gives us that space and the confidence to do that, I think.

Lee (13:48)
Yeah, so thinking about any intense emotional response, like self harm, other types OF mental health challenges that people may experience, the idea of an iceberg feels really powerful where something maybe the tip of the surface, it might be distress, it might be the self harm itself is the bit that shows up. But underneath that is so much complexity, there's thoughts, there's emotions, relationship experiences, there's stuff going on at school, pressure, social media, all of those things wound up in ways that are probably very difficult to unpick and quite difficult to talk about. 

And yet they're all still very relevant. And so perhaps us being able find some space to pause and be with it and have that curiosity. And perhaps literature helps us to create a curiosity to understand, I want to hear more about this. I understand more about that and to sit and be with the person as you say, with their emotions. And also for the person themselves, I think when emotions are very intense and sometimes there are traumatic experiences.

It is very hard to put those things into words, I think, and we don't always have the language to be able to clearly articulate what's going on. And maybe literature helps to create some words to describe things that otherwise just feel very jumbled up and very complicated and then perhaps overwhelming as a consequence.

Charley Baker (15:11)
I think getting that language reading other people's experience, I think is something that's so valuable and something that we can't replicate in any other ways. So it might be that it's a short piece that's in a newspaper, but it sparks our interest and wanting to learn a bit more. 

Or it might be in a clinical setting, a patient that we see and we think, don't understand where you're coming from or I can't understand what's going on for you so I want to learn more and I think going away and learning through fiction is a really enjoyable way of doing that.

think there's a couple of different ways trauma can be represented in helping us to understand. And an example of that, I think that's really strong was when the 9-11 attacks happened, there was a huge literature that came out after then of, authors trying to work through their own trauma of 9-11 and those of us who witnessed it vicariously from the safety of our sofas, for example, we couldn't understand it. It was too big for us to have a language to understand initially.

Again, reading about it gives us a different language and gives us a different approach. So trauma and collective trauma, I think has a really important role to play in terms of understanding things like our experiences as women, for example, and our experiences of being a woman in a very masculine world. It might be that it's our experiences of different cultures, it's something that gives us a different insight. things like the kite runner really important examples of that.

again it's that shared understanding that we can develop or not a shared understanding but an understanding that experience might be unfamiliar to us but really deeply affecting that person that we're talking to or that we're seeing.

Lee (17:19)
This is the Choice Pause, a short two to three minute tool drawn from my books and therapy practice that you'll hear in every episode, each time with something different to help you pause, notice and choose your next step. Today's pause is opening space for creativity.

Take a slow breath in and a longer breath out. Let your shoulders drop. 
and let go of any tension in your jaw or around your eyes. As we pause, can you notice, just briefly, whether there's a part of you that enjoys exploring ideas or stories or discovering something new about the world or about yourself, even in small ways.

There's no need to be certain or to change anything right now. Simply allow a little space for curiosity and discovery.

Creativity often begins in tiny moments. A thought, a question, a spark of Those gentle pauses where we find ourselves thinking, I wonder, where we find ourselves noticing something about ourselves or about the world.

Rest in that feeling for a moment. The ease of not striving but Just noticing and being curious. Now think about one small easy creative choice that you might make today. 

A doodle, journaling, noticing something beautiful, spending a minute with a book or a magazine that you enjoy, noticing what you need and finding one or two small ways to lift your well-being. Take one more slow breath and carry that sense of openness and curiosity into the rest of your day.

Lee (19:19)
it feels like there's a way of engaging people's attention on something really important. So perhaps there may be traumatic experiences that people might 
be fearful of approaching if it was just a factual representation of this is what happened. But actually with literature, there's something safer about approaching these complex topics that means that we feel more engaged, that we feel more safe. So we are able to learn about something which feels quite distressing, which feels quite scary, and which we might otherwise feel that's too much for me. I feel overwhelmed by the idea of it, but perhaps I can think about engaging in a book which helps me to understand from the inside.

Charley Baker (19:57) 
Yeah, very much so. And I think it's It is a step beyond a simple recognition of the value of stories and more towards the value and the nourishment that we find through books.

I'm reflecting a lot on this idea of books being nourishing at the moment and being something that are beyond a comfort as well. of weeks ago, had this brilliant weekend where I had two books, two great books over the course of a weekend. And at the end of that weekend, I felt nourished. I felt like I'd had some space for me just to be immersed in books, immersed in literature, immersed in these stories that caught my attention. 

And it felt like an active process of relaxing. So relaxing, think we tend to think of as quite a passive thing that we're doing, but actually the process of reading those two books that weekend felt like I'd restored some of my energy. It felt like a gift. And I really, I love that about literature. I love the way that literature can make us feel as well as the education that can provide us or the understanding it can give us.

Lee (21:09)
I often talk about going to the petrol station for a refill and seeing books as actually fuel for wellbeing, not just relaxation and winding down, but actually something very active that gives us the energy to understand the world, to find a sense of space, to find some joy, find some enjoyment.

There may be relaxation, may be peacefulness. There may also be some excitement. There might be a thriller and it might actually be activating and really positive. And so we can find the book that we need. Maybe we need something quite slow and settling, or maybe we're sad and we need to explore something around grief, or maybe we would like some light relief difficulties our life. So it feels like there's so many options, which is lovely.

Charley Baker (21:59)
It is, there's books for everything. There's books for every situation and every scenario. I recently was affectionately referred to as a book pusher by a friend who had their own period of challenge and difficulty. And my reaction, as it always is was to buy them some books. And they'd said that they weren't a great reader. They didn't really read for pleasure. They didn't really...read as a hobby but actually having a book that they could get into made a real difference for them and I think has been quite transformational as they now tend to lend me books which is a real lovely shared moment but something about an active act of kindness I'm thinking of you.

But more than I'm thinking of you, it's, I've read this book and I think it's something you can relate to, or I've read this book and it was hilarious. And at the moment, life is really challenging for you. And I want you to have a little bit of light relief.

It was So Lucky, which I've recommended to several people and bought several copies of to give people as well, because it was just the joy of being in that book was just wonderful. And it was something that I wanted other people to have as well. And actually the people who've had that have all been experiencing their own difficulties, life difficulties. And it's just become my go-to book for.

Here's something that might give you bit of time and space to yourself and here's something that might just take you outside of your own head a little while.

Lee (23:32)
It's really interesting because we might often think literature and reading as being quite a solo, solitary activity. But what we're actually talking about here is a number of things that really increase connection. So it might be thinking about somebody as you read a book and thinking, wow, this would be such a great book. I'm going to share it with them. And then having that conversation with them, connecting with them, demonstrating that thought in action saying

I'd love you to read this, and so that people will feel seen, they'll feel cared about, feel understood as a consequence. So there's a range of ways that we can connect there. And then we've also talked about some of the ways that we might connect with others by increasing our sense of empathy, broadening our ability to understand difficult experiences, being able to sit with people when they're in distress, which can help, I think, often really build connection as well without 
doing as much as being present and being willing to be with someone in a dark place, which I think is incredibly powerful, important. we're really hearing about all of these ways reading and literature can connection with others. And I wonder if you had thought of that as an important part of it.

Charley Baker (24:44)
think it's incredibly important and I think the act of sharing books and sharing stories is just, back to what I was saying about how nourished I felt. 

So for me, sharing a book with someone, whether that's a book club, whether it's a personal handing over of a book, because I've read this book and I think you'd really love it, or whether it's going on social media ⁓ and sharing, I quite often talk on social media about what book I'm reading that weekend and about why I want people to read it. So those connections I think are really important and really powerful. And it's something about thinking with someone and thinking about someone and that person then feeling cared for and that person feeling, like you say, recognised and heard and connected with.

connecting with people through stories is the heart of medicine. It's the heart of what we do in healthcare practise is we listen to people's stories, whether that's, I've got the worst sore throat I've ever had and I've got an oral exam in three days, or whether that's, I've just had a diagnosis of cancer and I don't know what to do with that. The sharing of stories is inherent in every clinical encounter. 

And I really think that having that in a social setting, is just irreplaceable. It goes beyond that simple sharing of a common interest for me and it's something that's quite an enacted kindness where you're saying, I think about you, I'm thinking about what you're going through, I'm thinking about what you've experienced or what a group of people have experienced. 

So with depression for example, I celebrate and share and recommend William Styron's Darkness Visible to anybody who's experienced a period of depression. Nothing that I've ever read before or since has represented depression and anxiety in a way that is just such a slim book, it's such a small book and it's so huge in terms of the areas it covers.

So I've bought a number of copies of that for people as well again, think it's something about saying this might be familiar. Some of what you read in this book might speak to you on a different level and it might help me to understand where you're at and it might give you a language to be able to talk to me about something. years ago I went to a conference and was a psychologist and their them. they were talking about how at the very start of therapy, weren't able to find the words to describe anything at all that had happened. So there was a lot of silence in that therapeutic space initially. through poems they started to find a shared language.

that idea of poetry forming words when something is so outside of language and outside of our ability to speak it, I think again, that's just so important, the way we connect differently and poetry I think does that in its own unique way because it's shorter, so it's often a lot more accessible. If somebody's saying I'm not a big reader or somebody's afraid of getting into books because they appear too challenging. 

I think when people are experiencing their own mental health challenges, and I know from my own experience with grief recently, that reading was taken away from me for a short period of time and I couldn't get into books. And that was really distressing for me as somebody who reads for everything and who always has two or three books around me at a time. I have two or three books in my bag when I go places in case I get stuck somewhere and the thought of being without a book is terrifying for me. 

So being in a space where because of grief, I couldn't read was awful and poetry was what gave me that gentle route back into being able to read again and I think poetry does that not only through being shorter but through how much is conveyed with just a few lines and how much we can take away from that and how much we all interpret it differently as well so there's no one right or wrong way to read a book or to read a poem and I love that

Lee (29:06)
As you're talking I was thinking about the fact that poetry and perhaps shorter books create some space so we can interpret it in different ways and also we might be invited to contribute a little bit. So we start to add our own perspective. We might start to build our own language around that and create our own narrative using that as a framework, as an point. So it feels very powerful may unleash creativity perhaps, which allows us to then start to and make sense of our own experiences.

Charley Baker (29:41)
Yeah, what you've just said there reminds me of there's two fantastic organisations One is the Reader Organisation, who have really promoted this idea of shared reading aloud and it's phenomenal. 

Some of the impact of that, I know, has been really incredible in places like prisons with groups of people that the act of speaking out loud and reading out loud together is really transformative. The other is the reading agency and have a selection of mood boosting books and they also promoted the idea of quick reads or simpler reads. And I know a number of my favorite authors, have done those quick read texts. So they are just that little bit more accessible. If somebody's not confident in their literacy, for example, that can be an easier route into reading

The other thing that it makes me think of is the amount of books that came out after A Boy Called It and there was a huge explosion of books about trauma, books written about people's experiences of abuse and of harm. And they were hugely popular. And actually I know quite a number of people who reading about other people's trauma made them able to say yes that's how I felt too and that was really powerful for them.

Lee (31:07)
What it makes me think about is finding our own unique relationship with what works for us, what our needs are, being able to recognise whether it's books, whether it's poetry, whether it's quick reads or we just actually want something really long to just absorb us for a period of time.

just trying to recognize that and find a way to hear what our needs are and  how literature can support that. We talked about connection with others, but I think there's a connection with ourself as well that we can also create through this process that helps us to listen to ourselves. I don't think we're always very good at hearing ourselves, perhaps and reading helps us to hear that as well. 

What do you think?

Charley Baker (31:51)
I think absolutely. I frequently tell my students that they need to take the weekend off and read something that's not to do with their PhD or their assignment. There's something really valuable about giving ourselves the permission to just sit and read. And it's

I think virtuous in a way that other hobbies may be a difference. alongside something like sport. So if we go for a really long walk, we kind of feel good about ourselves. We say, well, I've done a bit of exercise. I've done what I needed to do this weekend. Having the permission to curl up and read with a book and having that space and that time, I think it's so important and marking out time to read and time to just be is again something that we're not very good at. 

But like you say that connection we can get with ourselves around enjoying a book just because it's a really good book. I think is really important that permission to take a bit of time out. 

Lee (32:52)
Well, funnily enough, I think I would often do both at the same time in that I might often go for a long walk and listen to an read very voraciously as a child. then because I think I do a lot of work on the computer, I'm doing a lot of reading,

I do a lot of writing for my work. And somehow maybe it's aging eyes, but it's harder for me to read than it used to be. And so for me, the way back in to be able to re-engage was through audio books. so I might go for a long walk and also be listening to story or a book that I'm...really engaged in and I think it's a really powerful thing for me and so it's one of the times that I think I don't often suggest multitasking but I think actually that is a space where both of those are things that are I feel like they're nourishing me as you mentioned earlier and so it feels like actually that's a win on both sides.

Charley Baker (33:48)
Yeah, definitely. ⁓ Actually, you're the second person in two days to tell me about how they walk and listen to audiobooks at the same time. And isn't it fantastic? The best thing about literature, isn't it fantastic that we can access it in different ways so we can have of a book or poetry or whatever it might be, or we can have the paper version, or we can have the Kindle version.

or we can share it in a book group for example, isn't it amazing that we can access these stories in so many different ways? 

Like you say, if you're walking or if your housework or whatever it might be, being able to have the story accompanying that is really important and really nice, I think.

Lee (34:30)
Thank you so much. It's been such a great, interesting conversation. It makes me really want to think more about books. I think actually there's a couple of things I'd like to end with. And one is what are your current recommendations books you're sharing with people at the moment?

Charley Baker (34:45)
Oh, so that changes on a weekly basis and often several times during the So there's a couple of things that I've read recently that I've really enjoyed.

So one is the Secret Barristers most recent book, and it's called The Cutthroat Trial and that was fantastic. That kept me occupied for hours. And then just this weekend, I've been reading Louise Candlish's A Neighbour's Guide to Murder. It's got a wonderful female narrator who's an older lady and older women are so underrepresented in fiction.

So it's been really lovely reading this story narrated by an older lady who's just had a knee replacement. And it's given me that sense guess something that I hadn't felt since I read Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine, which is incredible and everybody should read it. It's a wonderful book. 

But again, it's something about having quirky or unusual narrators really gets me sucked in. I love books like that. And then the other books that I've been recommending to everybody, because they're so different. So they're Janice Hallett's collection of books, starting with The Appeal. They're books that are formed of different letters, different emails, different communications, types of narrative and all of her books in that way are, I think, really accessible compared with the idea of a chunk of a tome of a book. So reading in different formats, I think, is something that I really like and Janice Hallett does that really well.

Lee (36:23)
I've just finished a book called Love Untold by Ruth Jones so that's a book generations of women and it's also got a very female character and there's some really strong powerful women that it set in Wales.

They've just got such fabulous characterizations. I just love the strength of the characters. They're so believable. And there's a 90 year old character who's very central to the book, who just really gives me a sense of power and how as women we can lean into that. And there's a lot of humor woven into the book  as well, which I really love.  It just felt a really uplifting read for me.

Charley Baker (37:00)
I haven't read that one yet so it's another one to add to read pile.

Lee (37:04)
Well, I love the fact that also narrated by the author herself and she drew me into that world, which my own head isn't as good at creating the sense of being in South Wales as she can really bring that out. And so it really felt like I was immersed in that place, which for me, the language got woven in.

it's just interesting because I've listened to a few books where they set in a very strong culture and actually sometimes having that audio version where you have the accent you have the language, really helps you to feel more connected to the place. it's a I'd never really come across previously when I was reading and you say in your own voice basically whereas this one I heard in her voice, but still inside my head. So it's a sort of interesting kind of mix. 

Just to finish, we always do the choice space takeaway. So what would you suggest might be one or two small steps that someone could try with either reading or maybe writing to support their mood or well-being, to give themselves a little recharge, as we've been saying in their day-to-day life?

Charley Baker (38:07)
So I think there's two things that are really important. The first one is that if you are not a reader, it's something that you might want to have a think about trying. The local library is incredible. So taking a trip to the local library, asking what kind of books they have, and taking that little step towards getting out the house, saying to somebody, want something to read. I'm not a big reader, or I am a big reader and I want something new.

And then the other thing would be about the importance of recording our own stories. So journaling is something that I think is important and that can be as simple as a dear diary.  Today has been awful or it might be a few notes are jotted down on your phone in the notes app to remind you of how you felt with a particular book or a particular event. 

So think that's really important as well, thinking about how you share stories with yourself and how you keep memories to yourself and journaling, think is a good way of doing that.

Lee (39:06)
I love that and I'd add just picking something really small so it might be a magazine, it might be as you're in the supermarket they have lots of books in there that you can just pick one up and think that looks interesting and they're often quite low cost, so it's very accessible in our day-to-day lives. 

Just have a go and where it goes listen. Listen to what your needs Do you need something light? Do you need something a bit heavier? Do you need something to recognize emotion?  what's going on for us? I think that would be a real key one for me. 

And my other one that I would say is possibly controversial, interested in what you think, is that if you really don't like it, stop. 

Don't feel you have to keep reading something that you're not enjoying, there's so many different types of books, there's so many different types of literature, it might just be that it's not a connect. And so just pop it down and pick something else up.

Charley Baker (39:44)
Yeah. Yeah, if you've got 20 pages or 50 pages or a hundred pages in and you're going, this is awful, or this feels like a chore and it's something that's sat on your bedside table for a week, cause you don't want to go back into it. Bin it. Don't, well, don't bin it. put it to one side, it to a charity shop, pass it on to someone else and say, I didn't enjoy it, but you might like it.

Life is too short to spend it on books that we're not enjoying.

Lee (40:20)
Thanks for listening to the Choice Space podcast. I hope this conversation has offered you little more room to pause, breathe and find your own way forward. We've linked the ways you can connect with Charley in the show notes and if today's episode has been helpful please follow and share with someone else
who might find the space helpful as well. I'd love to have you with me for the next episode. Until then, take care and keep making space for what matters most.