Suzanne Harrington: Reading for mental health is cheaper than therapy

Go somewhere quiet. Close the door, turn your phone off.

If the pope, Iran, and — squints, adjusts varifocals — Tucker Carlson were not on your 2026 bingo card as entities you found yourself nodding along with, you’re probably not alone. Disorientated, yes, like that feeling of tilting nausea after a frantic fairground ride, but not alone.

Maybe it’s time to step back from the dystopian non-fiction unfolding all around us, and step into some illuminating non-fiction instead.

Reading for mental health is cheaper than therapy, healthier than vodka, quicker than a yoga retreat, and more accessible than fentanyl patches. A good book can reset your entire central nervous system, said no neurologist ever, but we readers know better. Go somewhere quiet. Close the door, turn your phone off. Maybe the garden, if it’s warm enough.

You could start with the enormous and enormously engrossing new biography of writer James Baldwin, whose life is meticulously examined in Baldwin: A Love Story. Biographer Nicholas Boggs follows Baldwin from his 1924 birth into extreme poverty in Harlem to his artistic awakening in Greenwich Village, then through Paris, Istanbul and Provence, examining the relationships which shaped him. 

Baldwin, who had no kids of his own, wrote how: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.” He also wrote: “Love is the only reality, the only terror, and the only hope.”

If you’re a fast reader, you might fancy another fat biography, this time about someone John Lennon described as “the world’s most famous unknown artist” — the incomparable Yoko Ono. This latest bio, by Paul Morley — try not to be put off by its terrible title, Love Magic Power Danger Bliss — focuses on her life amid the avant-garde diaspora, long before she became the most interesting Beatle.

Born into Japanese aristocracy in 1933, she moved to New York in the 1950s and connected with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, John Cage, Dada, Zen Buddhism, surrealism, and absurdism. “I was a rebel even in the avant-garde,” she said.

Pioneering women in politics are examined in historian Paula Bartley’s Trailblazers, starting in 1907 with a Finnish lesbian feminist vegetarian who, with 18 others, became the first women ever to be elected to the ruling body of any country.

It caught on. And while the progress of female politicians has not been entirely linear — which may be the most understated sentence in the history of understated sentences — this book tells the story of all kinds of lesser-known political heroines, and serves as a good-news antidote to presidents who AI themselves as Jesus while bombing civilians.

Anything by New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe is a must-read — his deep-dives into The Troubles, Say Nothing, and the opioid-peddling Sackler dynasty, Empire of Pain, are masterpieces of narrative non-fiction. His latest, London Falling, tells the true story of a 19-year-old North London Jewish kid who pretended to be the son of a Russian oligarch before, in 2019, falling from an expensive building into the Thames. It’s a cracker.

As is Liza Minnelli’s memoir, Kids, Wait Til You Hear This! — a goody-bag of gossipy glamour and unfiltered disclosure. Sometimes, we just need a good bitchfest. “I clearly wasn’t sober when I married this clown,” she writes of the late David Gest.

She has a massive go at Lady Gaga, and tells us all about shagging Martin Scorsese and Peter Sellers — although not at the same time — and what it was really like to be the daughter of Judy Garland. Insane. Glorious.

Happy reading, folks. Block that real world out.