Comfort
November is usually one of my favorite months, but this year, it has been a very long November in a very long fall. The cold feels colder, the dark earlier and darker than usual. Things feel heavy and hard. And so, because of this, I have been thinking about comfort.
One of the things I turn to for comfort is books. Reading. I am, I know, far from alone in this – we talk about comfort reading often. I have been considering what comfort reading means to me, and have realized that this is a thing that shifts.
For me, comfort reading doesn’t necessarily mean a book that makes me feel soothed, or happy. A beloved book that makes me weep when I’m reading it can be comfort in catharsis. And I don’t tend to gravitate to humorous fiction in my normal reading habits, which means that I also don’t tend to look for those books when I am looking for comfort in reading, even knowing that Wodehouse is amusing.
When I was drafting the book that became my debut novel, the only fiction I could read was romance novels. That was definitely a case of reading for comfort – my own book was a stressful thing to write, on a number of levels, and the guaranteed happily ever after in a romance novel was a needed escape from that.
But I’ve also found that comfort doesn’t always mean escape, when I’m reading. It can mean immersion – a book that requires me to be fully present reading it, a rich work of nonfiction or a poetry collection. Sometimes it means a book I’ve read so often and know so well that I know how I will feel when I am reading it, a kind of comfort that for me is like a favorite pair of soft sweats.
But regardless of precisely what kind of book, I’ve found that comfort for me, in the sense of solace, of self-soothing, does very often mean books. The idyll of being able to curl up, warm blanket, purring cat, good book, and find peace.