Comfort books

Or maybe I'm just saying this because I finally got to go to Dungeness to see his (erm) cottage and garden yesterday. If you can coerce a friend with a car to go there, do it. One of the most stark and beautiful places I have ever visited.

I really get a kick out of comics for 12-year old girls. Am I weird? I just love the formula (horses, suffering in silence, victorian ghosts, diaries, all that) and the crap dialogue (and 'thinks') -- I've always wanted to write one, but I think they just recycle old stories from the 70s all the time. (Which is what I'd do if I wrote one anyway, duh)

DG - how fucked up is you? You got some issues, I think you need some counselling to help your ass from bouncing off the walls when you get down some.

Although last night I read Banana Yoshimoto and I wouldn't say I got an instant "hee hee ace" from it but I've got a feeling she might very well turn into a bit of a read and re-read book...

What do you read when you don't want to expand your mind, you just want to cheer up?

― Maria, Saturday, October 13, 2001 12:00 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

No one can recommend some lighthearted reading material?

My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell. Full of anecdotes about animals, childhood obsessions, eccentric Greek peasants and townfolk, and his batshit family. (Lawrence Durrell is his older brother, who is gently and satisfyingly mocked throughout.)

The Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian - pretty much any of the 20 in the series. Ripping yarns of naval derring-do during the Napoleanic Wars, tempered with frolicsome wit, historic erudition and scientific exotica. Once you're hooked, you're a goner.

Franny And Zooey, JD Salinger. Not exactly 'lighthearted'...but I read it at least twice a year. I love it.

Also:
Harry Potter series
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
Cloudstreet - Tim Winton
Eucalyptus - Murray Bail
Nobody's Fool or Empire Falls - Richard Russo

They're my go-to peeps.

Any more good ideas for this? Prefereably something that will erase my mind and also that will require absolutely no effort to read.

Wodehouse in general and Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.

I like to read MAD magazine paperbacks when I am too stressed/stupid to read. I used to have a big collection of them, but then I got tired of owning so many books & I donated most to a juvenile prison.

Something else I like to read is the almanac. A bunch of facts in tiny print. It's not threatening. It's often peaceful because it's so banal and true. In John Barth's The End of the Road, the main character's (weird) therapist tells him to not read anything but the almanac, and I tried doing that for a while, and you do get to be in a pretty chill state of mind. I also used to have this little booklet of unit conversions that was even better. So many bushels = so many pecks. That's more of a soporific than actual reading material, but I miss that little pamphlet.

TBH I don't know that I have the same taste in "light reading" as other people. I took a lot of literature classes, so fiction still kind of feels like homework to me. I read a lot of cookbooks.

Oh, I also like to read trashy biographies about bands. I just read one about The Beach Boys when I was at the height of anxiety/stress and it did the trick.

Ah, I also like to read books of old Miss Manners columns because she is actually completely hilarious. One of the best writers ever. Plus, you get to learn how to be a better person. I think if people read her books instead of (or maybe in addition to) The Bible, we'd all be in a better place.

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LOVE these short story collections!

I usually re-read Franny and Zooey when I need to be comforted by reading. It's just terribly familiar.

I also like to read trashy biographies about bands

^^^ did this so much that I mentioned it in the 'Interests' section of my CV. Also, electronics books.

I read a lot of comics, so I don't often seek out a lot of comfort reading of the non-comic variety. Any collections of Onion material certainly fits the bill, though.

I like Abbott's almanac suggestion (although pointedly not End Of The Road itself, which is maybe the most depressing novel I've ever read). I do tend to skim reference materials a lot, it seems. If you can find one of those "how things work" books with the mechanical diagrams and layman explanations, those are pretty keen. Oh, and I love The Works by Kate Ascher, which does the same thing on a larger scale by showing how all of NYC's moving parts move the way they move.

Oral biographies are good for this. I've read Live From New York and Please Kill Me a good half dozen times each. Pretty In Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies by Jonathan Bernstein is a fun book. Kiki's Paris is a perennial fave.

haha, yes, The End of the Road is not a real cheer-up.

Actually think I'm going to with Agatha Christie, that old chap Poirot is always a delight to hang out with

Something else I like to read is the almanac.

Also stuff like Brewers Dictionary of Phrase & Fable--lots of small, weird, fascinating facts. I'm opening it at random now, and we've got, on one page, Grub Street, grummets, Mrs Grundy, gryphons, gudgeons, gruel, groundnut schemes and Gubbins ("the wild and savage inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Brentnor, Devon...")

Old edition online here: http://www.archive.org/details/brewersdictionar000544mbp

s'funny so many ppl mention franny and zooey; just reread that for the first time in years and was surprised how cheered-up i felt by the end of it.

abbott is totally right about miss manners; we have a big book of her old columns and it's pretty delightful stuff.

I like to read pulpy cyberpunk - william gibson, neal stephenson.

when I was kid there were a bunch of books I liked rereading - the enormous egg, by oliver buttersworth.

I see it was mentioned way upthread, but thumbing through any of my Calvin & Hobbes collections really soothes me and takes my mind off of things. So glad I've kept all those around... speaking of which, think I'm going to go dig one out right now.

I get the Stephenson/Gibson thing, yeah. Have read Cryptonomicon a couple of times after rainy days piled up. Wodehouse for actual cheer-up.

Tales of the Unexpected
Treasure Island

MR James. Albeit a strange kind of comfort, if read in the dead of night.

Just usually restart any one of a number of fantasy series, but Wodehouse is a good suggestion.

Calvin & Hobbes collections too.

Fairly similar to others:
Comics (esp Love and Rockets, Alan Moore things I've read 10k times before)
Reference books (Dictionaries (OED, Slang, Etymology), Phrase & Fable, Chambers London Gazetteer, usage guides, church guides, etc etc)
Wodehouse, Philip K Dick.

Big leatherbound 3500 page book of quotations

Anne of Green Gables and travel guides.

My sister gave me that "Dangerous Book for Boys" as a gift because I used to read the Almanac and Atlases as a kid. Its pretty awesome. See also the Schott's Miscellanies.

^ yeah to both.

xpost

Anne of Green Gables!!! Wow it has been so long since I have read those/seen the movies. Pollyanna is also in the same category for me. I don't really have to re-read Pollyanna, just think of some things she says (like thinking of good things that can come out of any situation) and the part where she puts up a prism in that sick guy's room and makes rainbows. awwww.

Raymond Chandler

Moomins, Day of the Triffids, Lucky Jim, Wodehouse

This Kingsley Amis book of all his writing on drinking, I am reading it right now & it might qualify. Except it makes me want to pour myself a drink every nine pages or so. It is called Everyday drinking : the distilled Kingsley Amis.

Comix, Raymond Chandler's poetry

John Dickson Carr, MR James, Kinglsey Amis, in particular The Green Man, essays, Memoirs, Lucky Jim and, (yes Abbott!), On Drink, esp the Hangover and Mean Sod's Guide to Drinking sections, Afternoon Men & From a View to a Death by Anthony Powell, Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper, A Wizard of Earthsea by UK le Guin, PG Wodehouse and dictionaries, Pevsner/Betjeman/church guides/local town guides + Ordnance Survey maps (if that makes any sense in this context).

my feel good books are weirdly ones that make me want to cry like tender is the night and the member of the wedding (srsly the last 20 pages) which is pretty good for ~connecting w/ my emotions~ bc i am way repressed.

Long books about spaceships.