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Comfort Reading
Jan. 25th, 2018 10:25 amOne of my favorite things about comfort reading is that while we all have a somewhat universal understanding of what someone means when they ask for comfort recs, everyone's own comfort reading lists are actually intensely, weirdly individual: of your reading history, of what's distressing you, of your idiosyncrasies.
I was aiming at making a sort-of list of my own favorite comfort books (which don't always overlap as much with my favorite overall books, because there are plenty of novels I love that just don't have that je ne sais quoi), and they tended to fall into the following categories:
Children's Books: One of the most understandable entries on this list. I think most people can get behind picking up Ballet Shoes or The Westing Game or The Tillerman Cycle for comfort, and I also have a deep fondness for rereading the Face on the Milk Carton series by Caroline B. Cooney (though not the wretched recent sequel, which I passionately loathe). Effortlessly absorbing and determine to entertain (and therefore keep your mind off things) from beginning to end, and familiar from countless rereads.
Books about Reading/Writing: The personal idiosyncrasy entry. If I own a book about writing or a book about books, odds are I've read it multiple times. I have read a librarian's reader's advisory guide to manga at least three times by now, ditto Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Stephen King's Danse Macabre, Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, etc. I think it's partly because I like lists and references and partly because books about books, in particular, give you the illusion of achieving a lot, because hey, you've just read about a bunch of stuff, at least.
Reasonably Happy Books: Another understandable entry. Certain romance novels--Glitterland, Laura's Wolf, A Lady Awakened, A Civil Contract, Cotillion, Again, Pricks and Pragmatism--and certain warm-hearted novels in other genres--The Goblin Emperor, Black River, The Fate of Mice, I Capture the Castle, Early Autumn, Les Miserables, High Fidelity, Gilead, In This House of Brede, The Stand, The Dark Tower, Hearts in Atlantis--etc. Some of these are a little more off-kilter than others, because there's a lot of suffering in, say, Black River and Les Miserables, but they all have a lot of empathy for their characters and resolve toward the light.
The "What the Fuck?" Books: Okay, maybe someone could understand why Joe R. Lansdale's violent, tragicomic Hap and Leonard series is on here--it's a multi-volume testament to the Power of Friendship with a lot of regional East Texas flavor--but Every Last One? The novel about a woman who has almost her entire family brutally murdered? Donald Westlake's The Hook and The Ax? They're both great, taut suspense novels--the first is especially brilliant, about a man who decides to weed out the competition for his job in a particularly violent manner, but the second, about a writer who agrees to do murder for the chance to ghostwrite something, is also awesome--but they're about criminals committing crimes and justice not especially coming for them. Tobias Wolff's Old School climaxes with an anxiety-inducing plagiarism scandal. And in what universe do Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and Little Tales of Misogyny count as comfort reading? Mine, apparently.
I think the key to that last category is that these are all either books I read when I was much younger, which have acquired comfort through sheer familiarity, or books that, despite all their darkness, follow through on the implicit reassurance I in particular need. Because comfort reading is also affected by why you need comforting, in my case, it's usually depression/anxiety, and what I find most reassuring is a book that acknowledge that terrible things happen and that people, even the protagonists, do terrible things, but the book still finds them sympathetic and not unworthy of our attention or love. There's rarely a sharper turn-off for me than a book, meant seriously, where a character is just cut off from authorial sympathy; that's more likely to give me anxiety, even if it's otherwise a fluffy book about good things happening to good people.
That last is a pattern you can see across most of these books, in particular in the guise of most of them not being entirely, completely happy. When I'm down, I need to be told that there are good things in the world apart from how I feel right then, or that there are good things that are still part of me, or that can be gotten to; "happy person stays happy or gets happier" does nothing for me when I'm in that kind of mood, because there's no nod to whatever I need comforting about. I need a book that comes right out with, "Look, these characters are about to live through--or fail to live through--some terrible things, but as awful as their circumstances are and as awful as they themselves may be, their choices, loves, and actions still matter."
Also, ideally the book would have a nice cover and lots of professional details about a job that I don't have, but I understand that you can't have everything.
I was aiming at making a sort-of list of my own favorite comfort books (which don't always overlap as much with my favorite overall books, because there are plenty of novels I love that just don't have that je ne sais quoi), and they tended to fall into the following categories:
Children's Books: One of the most understandable entries on this list. I think most people can get behind picking up Ballet Shoes or The Westing Game or The Tillerman Cycle for comfort, and I also have a deep fondness for rereading the Face on the Milk Carton series by Caroline B. Cooney (though not the wretched recent sequel, which I passionately loathe). Effortlessly absorbing and determine to entertain (and therefore keep your mind off things) from beginning to end, and familiar from countless rereads.
Books about Reading/Writing: The personal idiosyncrasy entry. If I own a book about writing or a book about books, odds are I've read it multiple times. I have read a librarian's reader's advisory guide to manga at least three times by now, ditto Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Stephen King's Danse Macabre, Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, etc. I think it's partly because I like lists and references and partly because books about books, in particular, give you the illusion of achieving a lot, because hey, you've just read about a bunch of stuff, at least.
Reasonably Happy Books: Another understandable entry. Certain romance novels--Glitterland, Laura's Wolf, A Lady Awakened, A Civil Contract, Cotillion, Again, Pricks and Pragmatism--and certain warm-hearted novels in other genres--The Goblin Emperor, Black River, The Fate of Mice, I Capture the Castle, Early Autumn, Les Miserables, High Fidelity, Gilead, In This House of Brede, The Stand, The Dark Tower, Hearts in Atlantis--etc. Some of these are a little more off-kilter than others, because there's a lot of suffering in, say, Black River and Les Miserables, but they all have a lot of empathy for their characters and resolve toward the light.
The "What the Fuck?" Books: Okay, maybe someone could understand why Joe R. Lansdale's violent, tragicomic Hap and Leonard series is on here--it's a multi-volume testament to the Power of Friendship with a lot of regional East Texas flavor--but Every Last One? The novel about a woman who has almost her entire family brutally murdered? Donald Westlake's The Hook and The Ax? They're both great, taut suspense novels--the first is especially brilliant, about a man who decides to weed out the competition for his job in a particularly violent manner, but the second, about a writer who agrees to do murder for the chance to ghostwrite something, is also awesome--but they're about criminals committing crimes and justice not especially coming for them. Tobias Wolff's Old School climaxes with an anxiety-inducing plagiarism scandal. And in what universe do Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and Little Tales of Misogyny count as comfort reading? Mine, apparently.
I think the key to that last category is that these are all either books I read when I was much younger, which have acquired comfort through sheer familiarity, or books that, despite all their darkness, follow through on the implicit reassurance I in particular need. Because comfort reading is also affected by why you need comforting, in my case, it's usually depression/anxiety, and what I find most reassuring is a book that acknowledge that terrible things happen and that people, even the protagonists, do terrible things, but the book still finds them sympathetic and not unworthy of our attention or love. There's rarely a sharper turn-off for me than a book, meant seriously, where a character is just cut off from authorial sympathy; that's more likely to give me anxiety, even if it's otherwise a fluffy book about good things happening to good people.
That last is a pattern you can see across most of these books, in particular in the guise of most of them not being entirely, completely happy. When I'm down, I need to be told that there are good things in the world apart from how I feel right then, or that there are good things that are still part of me, or that can be gotten to; "happy person stays happy or gets happier" does nothing for me when I'm in that kind of mood, because there's no nod to whatever I need comforting about. I need a book that comes right out with, "Look, these characters are about to live through--or fail to live through--some terrible things, but as awful as their circumstances are and as awful as they themselves may be, their choices, loves, and actions still matter."
Also, ideally the book would have a nice cover and lots of professional details about a job that I don't have, but I understand that you can't have everything.