The Comfort Read
Dear Reader,
Well, we all knew this one was coming, right? I was toggling between doing seasonal reads and comfort reads for today, as they are similar in certain respects. I guess what broke the tie was a piece from The Point that was about escape.
If you’re looking for an escape read, that piece is very much not it. There isn’t much comfort or escape in lines like, “There are, I feel, two types of writing now. Writing about the virus, and writing that claims to be about other subjects but which is really about the virus.” Well, then. That piece is a good one if you’d like something to keep mulling, but it certainly wasn’t an escape read.
The comfort read is almost always something you already know. For a new book or essay to be a comfort read, you’d have to really trust its author. I don’t know if I trust any writer that much. But I’m sure others might have a writer whom they can trust for a comfort read, whether it’s a new work or an old one.
The comfort read isn’t one where you skip over the bad parts—either you embrace the bad parts or there are none, which is more common. There might be tension in the read, as I find in Zane Grey’s Westerns, though you know they work out in the end. They might be humorous, as I find revisiting The Far Side comics. They can be a blast from the past—hello there, The Hardy Boys and Blaise Pascal. They can be collections of poetry—greetings, Billy Collins and your effervescence.
(I’m actually re-reading a book on magazine writing, an odd, older one that I picked up at a used book sale several years back. It’s basically completely out-of-date, and yet not. But I have read it before, and I remembered the relaxed style as being enjoyable. There was some slight necessity, as I had a piece of writing that was sticking in a particular spot, but there were more serious books I might have selected to help my brain get unstuck. I picked this one because I knew I’d enjoy the experience. And so I keep reading it.)
Comfort reads can be great literature. They can be middling literature. They can be sheer junk. While I don’t personally recommend that last category, the common quality of a comfort read is its ability to comfort, to entertain, to calm.
Comfort reads can be genre reads: mystery, fantasy, thriller, how-to manuals. They can be specific authors or magazines. It doesn’t matter. English scholar Alan Jacobs has made great use of his comfort reads.
But for most of us, we needn’t put our comfort reads to further use. Their use is in the read, the escape given and comfort delivered.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh
P.S. No, this was not the week for starting multi-part pieces. It just worked out that way, mostly because next week was supposed to be this week. Sometimes certain essays don’t come together in time, and so others take their place.