Yesterday was turning into a bad day for my pain condition, and I just felt the urge to pick up the books and start reading them again. I had just finished reading Ashok Banker's Ramayana and was casting around for something else to read. I tried a few others and none of them were doing the trick.
As soon as I had opened the first page of Philosopher's Stone I knew I had made the right choice. I was back among familiar faces listening to their voices as if I had known them all my life. Nothing lifts the spirits quite so much a visiting with friends you can count on.
I've never understood the saying "familiarity breeds contempt", or maybe it all depends on what you are being familiar with. For me, in the circumstances described in the article above, familiarity brings joy and relief. As others have comfort for the stomach, I have comfort for my head.
No matter how you look at it, in this day and age, anything any of us can draw comfort from is something to be treasured. For me it's my books because they free my mind to travel to places where I can find relief from my own reality. Sometimes they're better relief than any analgesic a doctor can prescribe.
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.