Big books and small marvels

The Reader Organisation’s Get into Reading programme is all about getting people together in groups to engage with serious books. The groups are mixed and the participants sometimes challenging, but the outcomes are often remarkable, writes PAUL STANISTREET

There is a moment during Eleanor McCann’s reading session with a group of mental health inpatients when two young men connect over boxing. Bothhave boxed at amateur level and one, David, has met Mike Tyson, his hero, the boxer he considers ‘the greatest’. Did he spar with him, asks fellow-inpatient, Mark, fascinated. He didn’t, says David, and wouldn’t want to. ‘He had hands like shovels,’ he says. It’s a trivial incident but in the context of the closed, isolated world of the inpatient unit such connections can lead to real breakthroughs. A quarter of an hour later, overcoming his earlier reluctance, Mark agrees to read aloud from Eleanor’s chosen text – Norman Mailer’s The Fight – a description of the 1974 world title bout between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman, better known as the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’. Mark and David are both familiar with the fight. ‘It was more a game of chess than a boxing match,’ Mark says. ‘Ali was a master tactician’. Before the end, Mark is reading one of his own poems out loud to the group, delivered with fierce conviction, in a thick Liverpudlian drawl. It’s good; really good. He turns to me with a grin. ‘Are you getting this down?’ he asks. Eleanor McCann has been a project worker at Mersey Care NHS Trust for around 18 months.

a Beverley La Roc hosting a Get into Reading group at Toxteth Library SPRING 2012 ADULTS LEARNING 39

She runs reading groups in a range of mental health settings, including psychiatric wards, secure hospitals and addictions services, as part of the Reader Organisation’s Get into Reading programme. The scheme brings people together through weekly read-aloud groups – around 300 across the country, delivering over 200,000 hours of reading each year – taking place in care homes, libraries, day centres, prisons, schools, community centres, hostels, refugee centres and workplaces. The aim is to make serious literature available to those most in need, enabling them to improve their health and wellbeing, to engage with others and to develop a lifelong love of reading. For some participants, the groups provide a critical way of building confidence, independence and a sense of personal happiness. For others, they offer a quiet, calm space, somewhere to escape the pressures of sometimes difficult lives. David is a good example. Troubled by the thought that he has been put under a curse, today’s group is the first session he has taken part in without talking about it. The concentrated effort involved in reading and discussing a piece of text means his mind is absorbed by something else, if only for an hour. Many of those Eleanor works with come to reading at a point of crisis in their lives. ‘There