You’re not supposed to cry on vacation, but what else can you do when you fear the boy will be killed by his abusive father? That’s when I switched over to falling in love with the rival author in the beach house next door. And spending time with the magical children who live on an island with a Phoenix for a guardian.
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I was on a reading retreat, and the only reason I know that phrase is because I’ve been seeing it everywhere this summer. Reading retreats, or book camps, are a hot travel trend, where friends or strangers get together somewhere beautiful and peaceful to read and bond over books. Except I wasn’t with a group on an organized retreat. I was completely alone, on my own self-imposed, two-day vacation from reality.
I needed a break. I’d had a summer of death, job loss and a brand-new sort of stress that somehow rivals the first two. I’d also had a summer of love, joy and an “American Pie” singalong with my kids in a California rental car that just might have been the best 8 minutes and 42 seconds of my life. Still, I think my summer scale tipped in the direction of the stressors, and after seeing Camp Unwritten, Reese’s Book Club’s glamping retreats, light up my Instagram, I decided I wanted in.
But Camp Unwritten was booked (no pun intended), not to mention a little out of my price range with the job loss and all. Which is how I got to Winter Park’s A-Frame Club, four books in hand, all by my lonesome.
How to do a reading retreat with yourself
Once I’d locked down my location — idyllic river/mountain/forest setting with all the comfortable amenities (read: in-room bathtub) I’d need — I planned the time. I was not going to rush down Interstate 70 on a Friday after work just to rush back to start working again. No, this was going to be a legit vacation. I booked Tuesday and Wednesday nights, smack dab in the middle of the week when I should have been working and child-rearing.
Next, I Googled what to do at book camp, but I didn’t get much help there because no matter how much I insisted that I truly meant book camp, Google wanted to fill me in on what to do at boot camp.
Before I left, I bought two books, and if you knew me and the anxiety I feel over my library hold list, you’d understand that this is an indulgence akin to staying at the Ritz-Carlton for a normal person. (My other two books were, indeed, library books, because a lifetime of scarcity mindset can’t be undone in a day.)
I also brought snacks: beef jerky, s’mores makings and a tray of cinnamon rolls for good measure. I was all set.
Reading is like riding a bike (sort of)
Before 2025, I hadn’t read a book in years. I blamed it on exhaustion from the kids, but really I think it was my own mental laziness. Instead of turning on my brain to new characters, scenarios and ideas, I turned it off, playing mindless games on my phone that didn’t require stepping into anyone else’s shoes.
But now, I think, I need to experience life – fact or fiction – as someone else. I need to explore those other characters, scenarios and ideas. (Maybe we all do.)
And so, I vowed to read more. “More” could have been a mere book or two, but something happened that I didn’t expect. I fell in love with reading novels again. From “The Paris Wife” to “All Fours” to “The House in the Cerulean Sea,” I devoured it all. I caught up on the authors I’d heard about but hadn’t read during my reading drought – Sally Rooney, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Fredrik Backman. I made up for lost time.
Typically, I only read at night, after my work is done and the kids are ready for bed. But here at my book camp, I could do nothing but read no matter the hour, and, in fact, at all hours.
Real, organized book camps do things like make friendship bracelets and sing “Kumbaya” around the fire. My version included my own craft hour of making bookmarks from dried flowers and contact paper while singing along to Richard Marx. I may not have done trust falls or sunrise yoga (yeah, right), but I did do activities like “try unsuccessfully to nap on the couch,” “eat a $13 pistachio pastry” and “yank the curtains and rod out of the wall when trying to close them.”
I had book discussion groups, albeit with myself. I considered why I’m comforted by Emily Henry’s romance trope of going somewhere else — somewhere not home — to fall in love, reconnect with family, write a book, fill-in-the-blank good thing. Isn’t that what I was doing there at book camp? I was using somewhere else to try to improve some aspect of my life.
And what aspect was that exactly? To better deal with death, job loss and the new stressor? To hit reset on my stress level so I could go back to real life and not feel so exhausted and burned out all the time? The escape is the appeal of both Henry’s books and of vacations like this, but what happens when the book is finished, when those escaping characters go back to real life?
Time to read. And read
I read and read, in a quiet frenzy because I knew this was my chance to devote not-quite-48 hours to myself. I read on my porch, at restaurants, in the bath, in bed, in a hot tub. I read more pages in two days than I’d read in two months.
I cycled among all four books during my retreat, but I finished “My Friends” by Fredrik Backman. That’s the book that made me cry — first from sadness, then from fear for a young character, and then, in true Backman fashion, from happiness and joy. He breaks our hearts and puts them back together again, and it’s the putting back together that makes us cry the hardest.
But here’s the thing. It didn’t feel as good as I’d thought to cry over someone else’s story, or even to fall in love with the fictitious rival author next door. I enjoyed my escape, but I craved home, my real life, stressors included.
And so I packed up and returned to my own story, ready to step back into my own shoes.
Allyson Reedy is a freelance writer, a former Denver Post staffer, and an author, most recently of “Mrs. Wilson’s Affair,” coming in October from Union Square & Co. publishers.