A Bibliotherapist’s Guide to Summer Reading That Restores and Replenishes
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Summer reading lists or the best books of the year have been popping up everywhere! And of course the novelty factor that they evoke, hooks readers’ curiosity. Popping up with the same bright insistence: beach reads, page-turners, summer thrillers, romantasy, self-improvement titles, books to pack, books to finish before the season ends, the summer reading challenges.
Today I wanted to devote space to the literature that some of us might need to restore ourselves from what has been an insane first half of the year. I know many of us have been feeling overwhelmed with the sheer pace of news, technology, AI and just how fast our world seems to be changing overnight.
In true bibliotherapeutic style, if I can call call it that, inspired by the third section of my book, Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading, titled “The Art of Literary Curation”, I invite you to be wholly intentional about what you read, focusing on what I call restorative reading. Reading that replenishes us, offering us a capacity to inhabit it: to stare at the sea, to eat peaches, to sleep for copious amounts of time at leisure, to find pleasure in the small things, to indulge in comedy. A reminder that the world is more than work, crisis, and obligation.
A restorative summer reading life
A restorative summer reading life begins with permission: permission to read intentionally; to read at our heart’s desire; to not finish; to reread; to choose a book because the sentences taste of salt, figs, or delicious childhood memories, that indulge us or comfort us like an ocean breeze on a warm summer’s day.
Books that Restore Our Sense of Play and Bring Joy
I often think of books that restore our sense of play. For example, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (who wrote The Hundred and One Dalmatians later) is narrated by Cassandra Mortmain, a witty, observant teenage girl who lives with her eccentric, impoverished family in a crumbling English castle. Her father is a blocked writer, her stepmother is an artist’s model, and her sister Rose longs for a more glamorous life. When two wealthy American brothers arrive nearby, the family’s world changes. It is often recommended as restorative summer reading because it is charming, funny, romantic, and full of atmosphere: old castles, diaries, first love, family chaos, poverty, creativity, longing, and the pleasure of noticing everyday beauty. Essentially, a coming-of-age novel about a young woman writing herself into being, love, and adulthood from inside a crumbling castle. It will most definitely leave you feeling re-energised.
For a sharper, more grown-up version, Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April might be an interesting one to pick up. It begins with two unhappy London women, Lotty Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot, who stumble upon an advert showcasing a small medieval castle in Italy available to rent for the month of April. Both are emotionally starved in different ways: Lotty is trapped in a dreary marriage, while Rose feels lonely and spiritually depleted. They invite two other women in a similar conundrum to join them.
Once they arrive in Italy, the castle, sunshine, gardens, sea air, and wisteria has a soft transformative effect: as the women, surrounded by beauty, friendship, nature and a change of environment, are able to indulge in rest and pleasure, opening themselves to being more honest with themselves and also to love.
A luminous novel about how place and solitude can quietly restore a life.
Books for Sensory Pleasure
For sensory pleasure, I would prescribe Colette. Almost any Colette will do, but Break of Day is especially suited to a slower summer reading practice. Her prose is full of gardens, animals, heat, appetite, ageing, and self-possession. Colette teaches us to read with the skin and sensuality, paying attention to every day beauty - the ripeness of fruit, the quality of morning light, the warmth of a pet.
Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Sea Change or Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets also offer a change of scene in abundance, while Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, a book about our relationship with nature and the surrounding landscapes, offer a quite atmospheric presences, that almost dissolves the boundary between our bodies and world.
For emotional reset, there are times when we need novels that hold complexity without overwhelming us. Barbara Pym is perfect for this. Excellent Women may look, from the outside, like a small domestic comedy, but its emotional intelligence is profound. Pym’s world of parish life, unpaid female labour, awkward lunches, and quiet disappointments offers a particular kind of consolation: the recognition that ordinary lives are not minor lives.
If you are exhausted by resilience culture, that is the demand to keep going, keep improving, keep becoming stronger, I would whole-heartedly recommend Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. This is a novel of such tenderness that it almost alters the pace of the reader’s breathing. Written as a letter from an elderly minister to his young son, it is filled with memory, regret, forgiveness, light, and attention to the sacredness of ordinary things. Something that summer often invites us to immerse ourselves in if we only let it, to be present with ourselves and fully appreciate the beauty in everyday things.
Sometimes restoration requires laughter. For that, I would turn to Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, a comic masterpiece. Flora Poste arrives among her melodramatic rural relatives and proceeds to reorganise their chaos with cheerful competence. It is witty, absurd, and deeply satisfying. It’s charm lies in the simple pleasure of remembering that life can be ridiculous and that one is allowed to find it funny.
The Romantic Summer Read
Love stories can restore our faith in connection, tenderness, timing, and the feeling of being seen in all our imperfection. E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View is a near-perfect summer novel because it is about awakening: to Italy, to the body, to desire, to truth.
Navigating Loss
For those of us who have been living with a difficult loss, grief, illness, burnout, or emotional depletion, I would suggest Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. Set on a small Finnish island, it follows a grandmother and granddaughter through conversations, storms, silences, games, and small acts of living. It is spare, wise, unsentimental, and full of air. It is a book that shows how to live while we grieve and honour our losses and hold both the emotions of grief but also those of affection, curiosity and kindness, and make space for these emotions too.
And finally some Poetry….
Any restorative summer reading guide is incomplete without some poetry. In fact, poetry may be the ideal form for those who feel too tired to read long prose. A poem demands less time from us than a novel but often gives us a more emotionally immersive experience.
For beginners Mary Oliver’s poems return us to the world with a simplicity that is harder to achieve than it looks. Derek Walcott’s Omeros, meanwhile, offers the sea in a different register: epic, historical, wounded, radiant. And for those who want the sensuous and the sacred intertwined, Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems can make even a brief reading feel like an inward cleansing.
Summer is a wonderful time to re-invigorate our senses. Return to pleasure. Re-energise the body. Return to the books that give as nourishment through companionship, care, and sensory pleasure.
In short, a restorative summer reading list might look like this:
For joy: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
For renewal: The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
For sensual pleasure: Break of Day by Colette
For nature and attention: The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
For emotional steadiness: Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
For tenderness: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
For laughter: Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
For awakening: A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
For grief and replenishment: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
For a dose of poetry: Mary Oliver, Derek Walcott, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Summer reading brings the opportunity to experience a kaleidoscopic variety of all these human emotions for the purposes of replenishing us with a dose of colour, vibrancy and sense of re-emergence, renewed to take on the world again.
I hope you get a chance to pick up a few of these, and if there are any you think I should add, let me know here or message me, I always write back!
If you are interested in Bibliotherapy, you might enjoy my book, Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading or our Online Bibliotherapy Courses.
