Since last week, we’ve been talking about what constitutes a comfort read. Anything you think of as a comfort read qualifies. Is it a book you reread? A lot of people don’t reread because there are too many new books out there. Is it a genre you turn to, short stories, essays, fantasy? Is there an author or a setting you like to read when the world is upside down? Or, what jumpstarts your reading when nothing seems to interest you? A new cookbook? A book about Paris? A mystery in a favorite series? I think a lot of people turned to fantasy in the last year or so to escape into another world. The current state of the world and our politics caused a number of us to want to turn off the news and read something that brings warmth and joy. You can add any books or genres you want to this topic. I’m just curious. I’ll start.
It seems my favorite comfort reads are essays. I have two books that I turn to again and again. I can read just an essay or two, and I don’t have to read an entire book or series. The first is my all-time favorite book. It’s called A Thread of Blue Denim by Patricia Penton Leimbach. I think it’s out-of-print, but you can find copies online.
There are so many reasons I love this collection. My aunt gave me a signed copy of the book. Patricia Leimbach was the first author who ever spoke at a library program when I invited her. She’s from the area close to where I grew up so I recognize the places she talks about in her essays. Leimbach married a farmer, and there were farmers on both sides of my family, so I recognize the work she talks about, the life. I used her essays when I did Readers’ Theater in Florida, including her piece “Literary Landscapes”. That piece still makes me cry because it tells my story as a girl who read. Many of Leimbach’s pieces were written for journals that catered to farm wives, and she talks about a world that doesn’t exist as much as it did in the past. But, it’s a past that draws me back, and I read those pages with a love of a life that my grandmothers lived, and my mom did for a short time.
Several months after my husband died, I picked up a book called God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours by Regina Brett. Brett and I were at Kent State at the same time. We’re the same age, but she had a much harder life than I did.
Brett says when she turned 45, she reflected on all life had taught here. When she turned 50, she wrote about the lessons she’d learned in life; becoming a single parent, battling cancer, making peace with her difficult childhood. She wrote them in her column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, one of the most popular columns ever published there. Some of those lessons didn’t apply to me, but as a new widow in my fifties, some of those lessons hit home. I don’t turn to this as often as I pick up A Thread of Blue Denim, but the book still means a lot.
I own copies of both of these books, and I pick them up when I can’t get into anything else, or I want a short nostalgic piece. However, over the years, I’ve turned to others. The first is a funny story. I used to say my goal in life was to be Director of my hometown library. A year after grad school, I was bored with my first job, and looking for another one. The directorship of my hometown library came open just at that time. I applied and waited. However, I wanted that job so much that I couldn’t concentrate on books. I found something I could read, though, that helped me escape. I read Nancy Drew mysteries.
Nancy Drew mysteries were the only books that I could use to escape as I waited. And, I waited quite a long time because the library board president had a son getting married. In all the hubbub around that, she lost my application. Fortunately, she eventually found it, and I got my dream job. Later, when people asked me what my goal was, I said I didn’t have any. I achieved it when I was twenty-two. I became Director of the Huron Public Library.
There was a time this year when I couldn’t read anything. I finally picked up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I own the whole series, so it was easy to pick one up and escape all the politics, news, and worry.
My reading has changed over the years. Some of it is due to publishing trends. I don’t read as many traditional mysteries, but they’re not publishing as many. There are a lot more thrillers and psychological suspense, and I’m not a fan of either. I won’t read women and children in jeopardy books. I love police procedurals. I have authors I love such as Sarah Addison Allen and Barbara O’Neal who both write magical realism. I find literary fiction too deep, often too dark and depressing for my taste. I can escape into some fantasy worlds. I read some romance. Those are escapes for me.
Comfort reads to me are often ones that are escapes, whether escapes into the familiar, such as essays, or escape into a world that promises an eventual happy ending or a satisfying one. I love Nora Roberts’ trilogies and her J.D. Robb books with satisfying endings. Even my police procedurals usually end with good triumphing over evil. That’s what I want in a comfort read.
What about you? I think I left this wide open for you to mention your own comfort reads. What do you find satisfying? Where do you escape?
When I can’t really concentrate, but need to read, I usually go with some sort of comic strip collection. I have a sizable collection from the well known, like Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield, to ones like Captain Ecology, which I think was only in a kids’ magazine.
Whenever I see one I don’t have, I get it if I can.
Too bad the art form seems to be quickly dying along with the newspapers that used to print them.
It is a shame, Glen. There are some comic strips I’ve loved over the years. I didn’t always get Calvin and Hobbes, but I absolutely loved Calvin and those snowmen. I was the right age for Cathy. The comics in my Mom’s paper are pitiful, but The Columbus Dispatch still has a whole section for them. My sister has a number of collections, too. I used to get a number of them at the library, including Garfield. I liked the ones that made me laugh. I get those as comfort reads.
One of my favourite comic strips is ‘Pearls Before Swine’. Love that one and have from the very beginning.
As I said before – and just like Jeff – I seldom re-read books. There are just too many shiny new ones to read, and the older I get the less time there will be left for me to read all of those!
Having said that, I will always love P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘JEEVES and WOOSTER’ books, whether it’s one of the stories or one of the novels. The first was written in 1916, I think.
They are set in the decade between 1920 – 1930 in ‘pre-WWll upperclass society’. The main character is Bertie Wooster, one of the idle rich; not the most intelligent man that ever lived, but basically good at heart. A couple of quotes by Bertie:
“I hadn’t the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.”
Or “For a moment I was under the impression that my visitor’s emotion was due to his having found me at this advanced hour in pyjamas and a dressing gown, a costume which, if worn at three o’clock in the afternoon, is always liable to start a train of thought.”
The stories take place either in Bertie’s flat in London, or at The Drones Club of which he is a member, or at some acquaintance or other’s country home. And always there is the
long-suffering, oh so proper Jeeves, Bertie’s butler/valet who never fails to save the day.
“There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.”
They are just delightful! Lighthearted, so funny, sometimes (often?) completely absurd, but the stories, the language, the writing, the madcap shenanigans are the best escapist reading ever. I no sooner have to hear the names Honoria Glossop, Madeline Bassett, Aunt Dahlia, Aunt Agatha than I am instantly transported. These books definitely count as comfort reads for me, and can always be relied on to cheer me up.
I asked David what he would classify as comfort reads for him and he said THE HOBBIT, as well as all the NERO WOLFE books, most of which he read throughout his teenage years. Many read-through-the-night sessions.
Lindy, Hooray for David, who considers the NERO WOLFE books comfort reads. That is at the top of my list.
And you have talked me into reading some of the JEEVES AND WOOSTER books by Wodehouse. Can you believe I have never read anything by Wodehouse?
When I need a comfort read, I like to read about familiar characters in series. Top choices are the NERO WOLFE series by Rex Stout (all would be rereads) or the HERCULE POIROT or the MISS MARPLE series by Agatha Christie. The BERNARD SAMSON series by Len Deighton, a spy series set during the Cold War, is also a delight.
Books about books and books about cats also work well for me when I need a comfort book.
Here are some recent books I read in the last year that were comfort books for me:
I SEE YOU’VE CALLED IN DEAD by John Kenney
THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES by Amy Tan
GOING TO BEAUTIFUL by Anthony Bidulka
ANXIOUS PEOPLE by Fredrik Backman
THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB by Karen Joy Fowler
THE LONELY HEARTS BOOK CLUB by Lucy Gilmore