The characters all feel like friends after a while, so that even though you end up reading the same stories over and over again, it doesn't matter because you are getting an opportunity to visit with close friends. You know their quirks and idiosyncrasies as well as your own after a while, which only serves to increase the feelings of comfort and familiarity.
There's a rather glaring omission from that list above, but that's not because I don't feel like it belongs in this category of comfort books, but with due respect to the above authors, they have become my standard for comfort books. Maybe because it was the timing in which they came into my life that I'm of this opinion, but to my mind J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is without a doubt the finest comfort food my mind has ever found.
In May of 2002, in an attempt to solve my chronic pain condition, I had some fairly major surgery done; the lower right side of my colon, including the cecum and a good chunk of the ascending colon were removed. After a week in the hospital, I was released on a Tuesday.
By Friday of that week, I was in emergency, in so much pain that I couldn't straighten. I had developed an abscess and had to be kept in the hospital an additional three weeks being pumped full of antibiotics and morphine. Needless to say, by the time I got out of the hospital I was feeling a little beat up.
On my first full day out of the hospital, my second day home, my older brother and sister in-law came down from Ottawa for a visit. They brought me the first book in the series Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (for some reason it was changed to Sorcerer's Stone in the United States and translated into American idioms) as a get-well present. I read it three times in the first week I owned it.
It's not like its great literature, or even the best-written book in the world, but there is something about the series that appeals on a comfort level. Each time I open the books it feels like I'm visiting with old and dear friends. I'm always surprised that they're doing the same things they were doing the last time I read about them, because I'm almost not reading them as stories but visiting the people in the books.
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.