You’re someone who enjoys reading, you’re curious and open for literary flights of the imagination that transport you out of your daily routines. While you recognize that books make indispensable companions in our lives, you find it hard to find the time and leisure to devote yourself to your literary leanings or explore less familiar book territory.

The Comfort of Books takes you on a journey. Books are our faithful friends, they reflect our deeper desires and inner struggles back to us, and sometimes they even change our lives. Literature is a proven vehicle for self-reflection.

Thus the journey begins with a questionnaire about your literary preferences and related themes, offering you the opportunity to pause and reflect. In the conversation that follows the questionnaire, we will expand further into your reading habits, both your literary inclinations as well as antipathies. Based on the questionnaire and the conversation, I will go on to compile a reading list specific to you, comprising five to seven titles.

This is an open-ended journey, a journey where hitherto unknown possibilities, themes and pathways may present themselves. You will find new entry-points into your book cosmos, which expands in scope and offers you new perspectives – into the world, into the self and into how we might see the world differently. You will discover the leisure of meandering and tracking your literary curiosity. It is at once a departure and a homecoming. Susan Sontag was known to have said, „My library is an archive of longings“. The Comfort of Books presents you with a key.

For further information and registration, kindly send me an email.

• First, you fill out a questionnaire
• Second, we have a one-on-one follow-up conversation (45 minutes)
• Third, on the basis of the questionnaire and the conversation, I compile a reading list which is custom-made to your profile

After registration, I will contact you within a few days in order to arrange an appointment. The conversations can take place in German, English, French and Italian.

The total cost is CHF 140.–

The Comfort of Books also makes for a wonderful gift! You can order gift vouchers here.

My name is Patrizia Crivelli. I started reading aged five and never looked back. I read all the time and everywhere. As a graduate of literature and art history, there can be no life without books. I spent many years as a university student working in a bookshop. I adore the smell of books and feel I could live in bookshop. That bookshop would probably be located in London. Since many years, I have been recommending books to my friends and family. With The Comfort of Books, a long-standing wish has come true for me.

Once a month at lunchtime in the Kornhausbibliothek in Bern, we talk about books over soup and bread (in German). I introduce favourite books. What is the joy of reading? What characterises beloved books? The focus is on dialogue and exchange with the participants, no prior knowledge is required. The participants’ own reading experiences are the personal treasure they bring with them. Participation is free of charge.

To the event