Comfort Reading

[mdlbear]

A mention of a comfort novel in someone else's LJ made me think about what I read for comfort. It's an interesting question.

Over the years I've had several books I kept returning to; I'm not sure whether it's for "comfort" or just to have something familiar that suits my mood, however odd that may be.

• When I was much younger and just discovering science fiction, I must have read Andre Norton's The Stars are Ours a dozen or so times. I'm not entirely sure why. I got over it.
• In college, I always resorted to Yeats when I was feeling particularly lonely. There was a stairwell in my dorm that was particularly resonant for late-night reading out loud; I have no idea whether anyone heard me. Much later I set The Cap and Bells to music.
• Somewhere around there I read The Lord of the Rings, when it first came out in paperback, and have read it once or twice a year ever since.
• I keep coming back, every once in a while, to Shakespeare's The Tempest. OK, I'm an incurable romantic.
• But when you get down to it, I think my all-time favorite author for "comfort" reading is Cordwainer Smith. Norstrillia, "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul", "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell", and especially "The Dead Lady of Clown Town". Others, too, but those are my favorites.

Excuse me, it's been a little too long since the last time I read "The Dead Lady of Clown Town". I have to go now...

Comments

[johno.livejournal.com]

Zenna Henderson - The People: No Different Flesh

that is the book I go back to on a regular basis. Whenever I'm really depressed or lonely, this book (and the whole People series) cheer me up, even as the tears flow from my eyes. Ms Henderson seems to understand the true meaning of community and what it means to join one and be accepted.

[telynor.livejournal.com]

The comfort novel I was talking about was Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time, a book I first read when I was ten and come back to time and time again. I love juvenile and YA literature in general, so many of my "comfort" authors are from that field.

Susan Cooper and Diana Wynne Jones are other examples of authors I read when I want literary comfort food. Connie Willis is in there somewhere, too; I love to re-read Bellwether on a long, lonely night. And there are a lot of those here in Georgia right now.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Hmm, LOTR is definitely one of my all-time comfort novels. Anything of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, that's another. And interestingly enough, August Derleth's Solar Pons series. (I've started rereading this, lately. Been too long.)
Norton used to have a couple that did it for me, too. But I haven't reread Moon of Three Rings for a loooong time.
The other ones I used to reread often were a collection of Rider Haggard: She, Ayesha: the Return of She, King Soloman's Mines, and (less known) The Spirit of Bambatse.

But lately, it's been heavy on the Victorian popular fiction, as published in Peterson's Magazine. It ranges from whimsical to highly idealistic, to nerve-wracking historical dramas like "Marie Antoinette's Talisman." Good stuff, all of it. What I curl up with when I'm sick.

[mdlbear]

Yeah; almost forgot about Holmes. Also the Father Brown stories and The Man Who Was Thursday, by Chesterton.

Actually, I seem not to have any specific comfort book -- anything that I like a lot will tend to get reread.