Two Inconvenient Women

In this season's conversations, Holly and Rachel each bring something that has caught their attention during the week, and spend time exploring some of the learning, unlearning, wisdom and practices that these provocations inspire.

This week, Holly reflects on a provocative statement from Mary Beard that she hates when people say they "love reading"; whilst Rachel muses on some of the ways a quote from the 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi helps us better understand our inner lives, collective healing, and ways to become more healthy and whole.

Some of the resources mentioned in this podcast include:

• Purpose-led Paradox - Helen Sieroda in APECS Reflexive Edge Journal (article)
• Why I hate the phrase "I really love reading" - Mary Beard, Booker Prize Chair 2026 (video)
• The benefits of reading for pleasure - University of Liverpool (PDF Report)
• All About Love: New Visions - bell hooks (book)
• Children and young people's reading in 2026 - National Literary Trust report (PDF)
• IFS (Internal Family System) Online Community (website)
• Keys to the Enneagram - A H Almaas (book)
• The Forty Rules of Love - Elif Shafak (book)

Here is the Mary Beard quote in full:

I cannot bear the phrase “I really love reading” and I cannot bear when I hear on Radio 4 in the morning, “what book first sparked your love of reading?” And I think this is to undermine and underrate reading, that’s why I don’t like the phrase. I get all kinds of pleasure from reading. I have a passion, in some sense, for reading, but reading is more essential to humanity now than just saying, “oh I really love it,” you know, like I might love golf or something like that. Reading is about how to be you and how to think about the world, and if we relegate it to the wellbeing section of our lives, we’re really underestimating it. I challenge anybody to say they feel better after they have read Kafka. I don’t believe they have, right? That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be reading Kafka, does it? And some of these books are not, I think, going to make you feel better. They’re going to make you see the world differently, and that’s not about love.

And here is the Rumi quote that Rachel brought to the conversation: Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

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