The book that changed me: How a 1970s poetry collection, The Honey of Man, still brings hope in grim times

For decades, researchers have investigated what reading affords us, whether “us” means individuals or communities. Their research points to the benefits reading offers in terms of physical and mental health, education, and, perhaps most of all, empathic attunement to other people, and to other times, places, cultures and traditions. Those of us who read, whether for recreation, research and study or because it is the centre of our lives, might agree in principle that reading is “good for us”, but few find it easy to elucidate precisely what benefits we gained from spending hours immersed in an imaginary world filled with what Roland Barthes called “paper beings”. And yet we keep doing it.