Comfort reading in a crisis
No one asked my opinion on what we ‘should’ be reading a crisis, and yet my opinion is here to yell at us all, because I keep seeing terrible, terrible takes all over Facebook and Twitter.
I’ve decided she’s a woman, my opinion, because she’s tall, powerful and frankly Amazonian. She actually has a lot in common with Marian Keyes’s opinion on this particular matter, and if that’s the only thing I ever have in common with one of my favourite writers I’m more than ok with that. My opinion wants to yell this:
READ WHATEVER THE F**K YOU WANT, IT’S A PANDEMIC FOR GOD’S SAKE.
The Sookie Stackhouse books are in my top 5 most-read books. I don’t often re-read books; when I do it’s almost always for comfort.
Don’t read at all, if the idea of doing so is stressing you out. Dance to Now 70s (channel 78 on Freeview, if you need it); lie on the living room floor topless and practice your Banshee screams. I don’t think it matters, just do what makes you happy. Apologies to the parents in the audience for whom topless Banshee-screaming is perhaps more appealing and simultaneously less logistically possible.
You’d be forgiven for bafflement as to why this is even something I have an opinion on, given it all seems so obvious and yet - AND YET - you wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen posts on all my social media timelines suggesting we should use this ‘time we’ve been given’ (WE’VE BEEN GIVEN F**K ALL, THIS IS A GLOBAL HEALTH EMERGENCY) to learn Japanese, invent a new type of sourdough and, of course, ‘read the classics’.
Ugh. I have so many issues with this, only one of which is that I (whisper it) don’t even like sourdough that much. Another, bigger, issue is that it’s such an elitist way of looking at books, one that I’ve taken very much agin (terminology stolen from the wonderful Ms Keyes) ever since I was at university, learning all about these so-called classics in literature.
Even if there was a definitive list of what constitutes a ‘classic’ (and there bloody well isn’t, fight me), there would still not be a rule anywhere that says a book only has artistic, literary, or any other type of merit if it happens to be on that list. What, for example, gives Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White more literary merit than Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret? I love both of those books (my undergraduate dissertation was about sensation fiction, so I’m possibly biased), but one of them gets a lot more traction in ‘best of’ lists than the other, and it wasn’t the one written by a woman.
That’s one of the issues with ‘the classics’ in general - you’d miss so much if you only read books that met some arbitrary criteria of ‘classicness’. I’m not suggesting that books written by (and to be fair, this is a generalisation, not all ‘classics’ fit this definition, but a LOT of them do) dead, white, heterosexual English-speaking men aren’t good - loads of them are, of course they are, but so are a lot of books by authors that… aren’t any of those things.
Also - and this is far more pertinent to the whole COVID-19 business - the idea that we should all be curled up with a cup of fruit tea and a literary classic, y’know, bettering ourselves kind of BETRAYS THE WHOLE POINT OF READING. In my opinion, anyway. Sure, you can read to better yourself, to learn something new or to improve a skill (at least, that’s if the hours I’ve spent on The Sims 4 this last week have taught me anything), but that isn’t why books exist… is it? I dunno, that might be a debate for another post. I don’t think it is. That’s the hill I’m intending to expire on, at any rate.
Let’s assume for a moment (or longer, if you insist) that I’m right. Let’s say the purpose of reading isn’t to become better, but to disappear from reality. To slip into story, to ‘live a thousand lives’ or whatever the quote is. That’s certainly the reason I read, and it’s especially important right now, I’d say.
So if you are in the reading mood during lockdown, and you don’t want to be guilted into reading something ‘classic’ in case you accidentally improve your mind or something equally horrifying, then you probably already have a list of things that might fit the bill. But just in case, here are five books from my collection that I turn back to whenever I want comforting, not bettering:
The Vampire Romance One: Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris, followed by all the ones that follow from it in the Sookie Stackhouse series, except maybe the last two or three. Then you can watch the True Blood series if you want. I would. I first read these books when I was in the USA working at a summer camp aged 19, and these books always transport me back to that age, that place, that time. Proper magic, that.
The Teenage Nostalgia One: I’ve written about teenage nostalgia a little already, but this time my choice would be The Forbidden Game Trilogy by L. J. Smith. They had the first 2 of these at my secondary school library, but the 3rd one was out of print so my Auntie Eileen got it for me for Christmas and it cost her ‘an arm and a leg’. I understand you can now also get them altogether in a single volume, so it counts as ‘one book’ for the purposes of this list.
The Favourite That’s On Telly Now One: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. And if you just want to read one of them, for comfort purposes, I’d actually suggest The Amber Spyglass even though it’s the last of the three - it’s just beautiful; watch out for the love story between Balthamos and Baruch <3
The Take Me To Another World One: Several worlds, actually - The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. A great one for life lessons - I, for one, always know where my towel is. Oh, and if you’re after a televisual version I’d 100% recommend the TV series with Simon Jones and David Dixon.
The Oh OK This One’s A Classic But I Still Find It Comforting One: Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. I read this when I was about 8 and didn’t understand any of the satirical subtext (after all, as a genius once said, I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards) but I still loved the idea of different worlds and a person’s relative experiences in them. I still do, actually - AND there is a bonus of ‘classics’ in the traditional sense which is that most of them are public domain now, so you can usually get digital copies for free (shout out to Project Gutenberg!).
The Hahahahaahhaahahaha Did You Seriously Think I’d End At 5 One: Rachel’s Holiday, by the one and only Queen of the Comfort Read Marian Keyes. I’d recommend something more recent of hers, except The Break emotionally shattered me (I may have been hormonal) and this one is easily one of my favourites. I think I stole a copy of this from my mum, and if I did then I’m very sorry Mama Sue because I don’t think you ever got it back.