In the past few years I have had more need than ever of comfort reading. Ever since the fall of 2001, when I first started going in and out of the emergency ward of the hospital on a regular basis, I haven't really been very interested in reality. I was living it a little too much to want to read about it.
The first building block in my fantasy rotation (I call the books that I read on a regular basis my rotation, because I will read through them all in order, and if nothing else is published by the time I get to the end of the rotation I will start over again) was that old standard, Tolkien. I've probably read The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit twice a year every year for the past 30-some years.
But a person can't live on hobbits alone, and there are a couple of others that have been old favourites for quite some time. British author Susan Cooper wrote The Dark Is Rising sequence, a five-part series about Will Stanton, the youngest of the Old Ones who's part of the great battle between the Light and the Dark who fight the long battle that's been fought since the time of Arthur in the British Isles.
Not only are they well-written, intelligent books, but they are wonderful history lessons that date back to ancient times and bring to life many of the mythical creatures out of Great Britain's long-forgotten history. How many other books can claim to have Herne the Hunter rubbing shoulders with Arthur Pendragon as characters?
Recent years have proven a bounty for people like me who are looking to escape out of their reality. Needless to say, so much of it is dross, but there are also some clear winners: Steven Erikson and his Malazon Book Of The Fallen sequence, James Barclay and his books about the Raven, and his new sequence Ascendants of Esotrea, R. Scott Baker's Prince of Nothing trilogy, and Ashok Banker's retelling of the 3000-year-old epic tale The Ramayana.
Each one of these authors has created a world where I can wander through and be amazed by the creatures, beings, and magic that inhabit their worlds. When your own world's boundaries are reduced by illness and pain, living vicariously through the pen of an author is sometimes your only recourse and a wonderful relief.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
I think the thing about "comfort food" reading is that it has to transport you entirely to another world. When I was a child it was English pony club-style books (as far from Australian suburbia as I could imagine - and the sort of active childhood I would only dream of); now my similar reading (and you might like to try them) is Jean Auel's "Earth's Children" series, set in Ice Age Europe during the encounter between "Cro-Magnon Man" and the Neanderthals.
The research is excellent, the writing is dreadful (you'd really love to take an editor's red pen to it), but the story - of a single orphan human girl taken in by Neanderthals, who single-handedly discovers virtually every human advance short of the forging of metals (the domestication of animals, the travois, the needle, making fire with flint ...) is just totally engrossing.
2 - Justene
One of my 14-year-olds is going to read Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave-Bear, the first in that series "next". I am practically pacing while I wait for her to finish her current book.