Comfort Reading
When life gets you down, READ
What is comfort reading?
It’s different for everyone.
For me, comfort reading is all about reading something - usually fiction - that calms my mind and gives me hope that human nature is not inherently foul, evil, and foolish.
Sometimes, re-reading a favorite book years later works its magic again, at least for some people. But I’ve found that I am not the same reader I was the first time I read a book, so I rarely reread it. I know, perhaps I would get more out of it, or maybe even less. A case in point is Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, which I read in my freshman year in college and adored. I tried reading it again a few years ago during a rather low moment, to no avail, and simply stuffed it back on the shelf. It no longer spoke to me.
Thus, I am constantly searching for the new, bright, shiny thing in books.
I know many people who reread books. Actually, I envy their ability to do so. But that’s me. What’s the old aphorism? “So many books, so little time.” That’s it, my reading philosophy, as it were. That said, I must confess something: I have read and re-read Viktor Frankl’s timeless book, Man’s Search for Meaning, many times.
Recent events in my life - and across the planet, too - have sent me into a bit of a downward spiral, both mentally and physically. I tried reading a bit of Agatha Christie and Louise Penny, but somehow even their books don’t speak to my state of mind, can’t lift me up as they usually do.
A random post on Facebook, or maybe in my email, or even perhaps word of mouth, led me to a few books that bolstered my soul.
What was I looking for? Kindness and peace. I found chunks of both in the following three books:
Goodnight, Mr. Wodehouse: A Novel, by Faith Sullivan
Theo of Golden: A Novel, by Allen Levi
The Backyard Bird Chronicles, by Amy Tan
If you want more comfort, or these three don’t speak to you, check out the following lists. Please be aware that I have read some of the books on the following lists, but not all. And, to be honest, not all of the suggestions on the lists would be comforting to me.
Maybe they will be to you, however.
So much of my reading lately only confirms my gloomy state of mind. Two books have plunged me deeper so i can scarcely recommend them as uplifters. But they were both immensely interesting and relevant to our current dilemma. Eric Larsen’s In the Garden of the Beasts recounts the short tenure of US Ambassador Dodd in 1930s Germany, while Sally Carson’s novel, Crooked Cross, is an account of political and personal turmoil in a small town near Munich in 1933. Reading them together was illuminating—and devastating.