Comfort Reading

As seen here and here via New Kid. When I first read the title I thought it must be referring to books one reads while in crisis. And for me at least what I read in the midst of the crisis is very different from what they've been describing, which is what one reads once the crisis has past and one is left to cope.

In the midst of crisis - that is, on the plane to the funeral or sitting in the hospital or waiting for the news on the phone - I read thrillers. As gory and light as possible. I discovered Robert Ludlum and read The Aquitaine Possession while my aunt was in the hospital in a coma two years ago. While my Granny was dying my whole family read everything written by Dan Brown - we traded the books around based on who was sitting with her while she slept. I have no idea if any of these are really good books but it doesn't matter because the whole point was to turn your brain off. They at least did that. (Having read more of Ludlum in a better frame of mind, I'm not sure they really turn a fully functioning brain off.... just a brain stupified with terror and grief). Books by people like J.D. Robb would also work. I tend to avoid favorite books at times like these because I don't want to contaminate them with the situation. (The Da Vinci Code will always be, for me, the book I read while my grandmother was dying and never a pop culture hit).

At various points after that, I've read other books that I found deeply moving and encouraging and comforting in my current situation. Anne Lamont's book Traveling Mercies and Plan B spoke deeply to me in the months afterwards. Neither of these books is about death actually - and they both are sharp and rather funny in a quirky sort of way- but they seemed to deal with grief in short bursts within particular stories. Around the same time, I reread Anne McCaffery's novel The Ship Who Sang which had just seemed like a nice fantasy story to me before and I was struck on the rereading by how overwhelmed the story was by the grief and sadness. The afterword says something about how it was written following a death of someone close to McCaffery, but I guess until I experienced that sort of grief, the intensity didn't come through to me.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is more a book about death, but I also found it interesting and comforting - of course I read it almost 3 years later and so was much more removed. I don't think I could have borne it immediately after a death. More recently Alice Munro's new book, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, took me back through some of those emotions and fears and the HBO TV series Six Feet Under has also been cathartic for me. The Alice Munro book, like Anne Lamont's, is a collection of short stories, which seems to me like the best thing to give. Because when each of these dip close in to death and fears about mortality, the next story pulls away and makes you laugh or have hope or get angry. The pull and push of the different tales keeps things moving along without getting too maudlin.

New Kid's list seemed to be more books she returns to over and over. When I am doing that, I go to anything by Anne McCaffery, Orson Scott Card, or L.M. Montgomery. Like the way she describes the Little House books I can read and reread and reread any of the series and enjoy them. I also have a few childhood favorites that never fail to please me. The Ordinary Princess and Goodbye Pink Pig are two - but I wouldn't give them to someone else. I think I love them because they represent pieces of my childhood and things I was processing as a child. Perhaps in the same way that Cat's Eye does for New Kid. I could list many more childhood favorites, but I think maybe I answered the original question in the previous paragraph.