As I get older I get increasingly po-faced and Spartan: I no longer believe in holidays, days off, video games, TV, leisure, smiling, friendship, politeness or sleep. My hero is, increasingly, Lieutenant Worf. I'm not great with a Bat'leth but, like any true Klingon, I choose to never laugh.
Klingons probably don't re-read books either, and generally speaking I also prefer not to - there are too many books out there waiting to be read to spend too much time re-reading. There are, though, occasions when I allow myself to indulge - never for more than five pages at a time, you understand - in reading a book from the shelf I have dedicated* to 'comfort reading': those books which I have read and re-read and which now have the feeling of the literary equivalent of warm socks on a cold night; of a hot toddie and a blanket on the sofa; of a pint and game pie in front of a roaring fire in a country pub; of fish pie out fresh of the oven when you've come in from the winter night.
What is on your comfort reading list? What are those books into which you like to escape when you need a bit of verbal TLC?
My top five would be:
- Uncontroversially and unsurprisingly, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I've been reading those books since I was in the womb, or at least in primary school at any rate, and although I'm no Christopher Lee, who reportedly would re-read LOTR once a year, I've probably gone through the series approaching ten times in the course of my life. It never gets old, because it reminds me of being young - I can still remember the feeling of being nine or ten, reading those books, and thinking that they were the bee's knees and that I was incredibly grown-up for grappling with them.
- I love most of Jack Vance's main series but the sheer pleasure I get from losing myself in the Lyonesse books can't really be put into words; if you had a gun to my head I would say it's a bit like what it must feel like to snuggle under a warm duvet with Teri Hatcher from circa 1994 with snow falling outside and a nice bottle of single malt to keep you company. And also lemon meringue pie. And a cheeseboard. And a big bowl of chilli con carne sprinkled with jalapenos and grated cheese....
- I will confess it: I really, really do like the first three A Song of Ice and Fire books, before poor old George went off the deep end. The first two in particular are almost perfect realisations of the vision he was clearly aiming to achieve; the great problem from book four onwards was clearly that the vision of the TV series inveigled itself into his brain and made his original one go all fuzzy. But, like with the LOTR I remember the context in which I first encountered them so well, and I'll never shake that feeling I had as a teenager when first dipping into A Game of Thrones and discovering something totally unlike any other fantasy series I had read.
- The collected Viriconium books may seem like an odd choice, because they are not comforting at all - they are very unsettling - but I've never been able to shake the feeling that their specialness deserves repeated engagement. From time to time, I simply acquire the urge to get my omnibus edition out and re-immerse myself. I can't explain it; it's like the feeling one gets, maybe twice a year, that one just really, really wants to eat a Costco hotdog and doesn't know why.
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is by no means perfect. But it remains the single Narnia book that I really enjoy going back to. It belongs to that strange genre of children's fiction which is both comforting and adventurous - a combination of warm Scandinavian hygge vibes combined with an exciting ocean voyage that no right-thinking child could possibly decline the opportunity to participate in. There are great scenes, great characters, and a great sensation of distance and exoticism in the journey it depicts.
There is another interesting category of books, which I would call the Disappointment Comfort List - those books that one read and loved as a child or young adult but which one later re-reads as a mature adult, expecting to find comforting, and finds to translate badly. I would include in this the Redwall series, Nicobobinus, the Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow and Thorn books, maybe also anything by Peter F Hamilton. For bonus points, include your own 'disappointments', too.
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*This is not remotely true - as if I have space in amongst all the kids' books!
1. Tolkien's The Hobbit
ReplyDelete2. Robert E. Howard's Conan tales
3. Robert E. Howard's Kull tales
4. Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea tales
5. Moorcock's first five Elric tales
6. Leiber's first seven Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales
7. Vance's The Dying Earth (but not its sequels)
8. Merritt's The Face in the Abyss and Dwellers in the Mirage
I have read The Hobbit almost 20 times, and the rest I have read 5 to 10 times each.
For me I find myself going back to Tolkein's The Hobbit, Asimov's Foundation (particularly the first book), Vance's Dying Earth and Clark Ashton Smith's collections of short stories. It should be no surprise to readers of this blog that many of these were recommended to me by Gary Gygax's Appendix N.
ReplyDeleteIf I read for pleasure, it's either going to be something historical, like some of the church fathers or church history. I'm a Christian and that's about the only thing non-fiction that I actually want to read in my later 40's.
ReplyDeleteBut for fun, for reading that I just want to lay back in a comfortable place and get lost in, it's some sort of fantasy.
Hobbit and Lord of the Rings - yeah, but I've read it so many times that I really need to give it a rest for a while. But going through my teens, with all the teen angst and change and such, reading Sam and Frodo's march to Mordor was like . . . intense. Man, it got me.
Narnia - good stuff. Haven't had a yearning to read it though. C.S. Lew is my boi though. His autobiography, "Surprised by Joy," is excellent. His sci-fi trilogy is pretty great too.
Got turned on to Jack Vance on a read through Appendix N challenge. Absolutely love his stuff. It's just plain fun, action-adventure. I'm kind of sad that I'm running out of stuff to read from him but I know I'll re-read some of it.
The Face in the Frost is a good one that I kept in the bookshelf.
My main kick lately has been Gene Wolfe. The Wizard Knight . . . wow, that sucked me in. I love dogs and the big dog in it had me. Wolfe has a way of writing that is different than anything I've ever read.
There's a small window of really good fantasy stuff and I hate it, but I know I'm running out. The modern stuff . . . no go for me
I think there's a lot of us in a similar position. Loving the fantasy genre for the very tiny sliver of greatness in amongst the terrible dross.
DeleteComfort books would include Vance's Dying Earth series, The Cats of Seroster by Robert Westall (talking cats fantasy in southern medieval France), Gerald Durrell's trilogy about his family living on Corfu between the world wars, anything by Bill Bryson, a couple of Iain M Banks (Inversions, Excession, Look to Windward). Disappointments: original Dragonlance trilogy, Glen Cook's Black Company series (may have to reevaluate this), some Bret Easton Ellis but not all. :-)
ReplyDeleteBill Bryson! Yes, I should have included him. I can still read those early travel books and enjoy them. Especially The Lost Continent - I can still remember reading that first time around and being in pain from laughing so hard.
Delete1. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings - yeah, just like the rest of you and with pretty much identical context. I find it means more to me as I get older and understand Frodo a bit better.
ReplyDelete2. Pratchett - still holds up. Of course, the early discworld books are weaker because they are pure parody, and the later parody books also don't hold up well. But there are excellent stories in there and if I had to pick two I'd probably go for Night Watch and Wee Free Men. I am so sad at Pratchett's passing and the way that his gradual decline is recorded in his later books that I sometimes find it difficult to have the heart to read his stuff at the moment, but I know I will go back to it.
3. 40K novels - The definition of genre trash, and I know it. Stuff by Abnett, Aaron Demski Bowden or Wraight is generally enjoyable enough that I like to read it though, and I grew up with a deep enthusiasm for 40K that I still have (though I do not like the modern version of the setting at all). So re-reading the early Gaunt's Ghosts novels or the small slice of the massive Heresy series that is good (most of it is absolute crap) is something I do from time to time, especially if life is not leaving me space to work on my miniatures or play any games.
4. Lovecraft - I'll give a whirl through Lovecraft's best stuff every now and then, usually in winter. I like the slow pace of life that the stories often show, I think I was built for that kind of life rather than the modern world. There's some weak stuff in his catalogue but the really good ones are well worth it.
Other than that, I've fallen away from re-reading. I used to re-read GRRM's stuff all the time, and I re-read a lot of "modern fantasy" stuff in my late 20s and early 30s. But it's all in the "doesn't hold up" bucket for me now.
I've been a STEM person my whole life and I read a lot of fantasy and sci fi. But I've become a bit disgusted at what Fantasy is these days and sci fi no longer appeals unless it is saying something more than "oh I've had this clever idea about technology". I also feel I'm a bit stunted by not reading more proper literature and especially translations of authors from other languages. So I'm addressing that somewhat, though I don't want "homework" so I'm following my interest mostly. Working on Dumas and some philosophy books atm, but I don't get a lot of time to read any more. Sometimes feels like I really did waste my time on genre trash as the literary critics I disliked were always telling me!
I certainly had the same realisation some years ago and now read a lot of 'the canon'. I've definitely found the canonical texts to be canonical for a reason.
DeleteThe books I keep rereading are
ReplyDeleteThe Lord of the Rings
Dune (Much the same appeal as LotR: a fervent, unwieldy, massive triumph of worldbuilding, with its foundations in the author's own peculiar and, to me, kind of perverse worldview - and it's one of the few books where the narrator having access to the thoughts of all the major characters makes them more, rather than less interesting.)
LeGuins The Tombs of Atuan and The Left Hand of Darkness (the other Earthsea works do nothing for me, and while I've appreciated the entire Hainish cycle, it's really only Left Hand I come back to again and again)
Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Farewell, my Lovely (I don't read crime and detective stuff, but the narration of these novels, with its turns of phrase and cynical empathy, and the loosely sketched but instantly compelling characters just warm the balls. And when Chandler takes a dump on Hemingway, I chuckle every time.)
Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy (Same as Chandler: the western or neo-western genre isn't at all interesting to me, but the language makes me want to recite out loud, and the descriptions of landscapes, dreams, and details of experience hit so hard each time. I like Blood Meridian and The Road, too, but they're maybe a little too intensely nihilistic to read again and again.)
Gibson's Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive (The preceding short stories and Neuromancer are great, sure, but I feel that when Gibson got all that great revolutionary worldbuilding and attitude out in those early works, that's when he really hit his stride. The tangibility of these books is something that really sticks with me.)
I suspect The Book of the New Sun will join these but so far I've only read it twice.
Now, on to the airing of grievances. The big disappointments so far have been everything by Asimov and Lem. Those two were my introduction to science fiction and I gobbled them up as a teenager. But while I can still pick up and enjoy many of my favorites from those days, like Zelazny's Lord of Light or Yoshikawa's Musashi, I haven't been able to finish anything by Asimov, and only a couple of works by Lem, and those grinding my teeth all the while, for almost twenty years. Asimov's a bore who thinks he's profound, and Lem's a bore who thinks he's a wit.
Yes, I know what you mean about Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. I really like Mona Lisa Overdrive especially - very underrated.
DeleteNon-fiction for me mostly, but in these times of political grumblings I tend to reach towards counterculture literature (for a false sense of "times they are a changing"). Been on a beat writer kick for the past couple days - On the Road (full scroll baby!), Naked Lunch, the poetry of Ginsberg... it's not all good, or even comforting really, but it feels appropriate.
ReplyDeleteFiction-wise, I prefer sci-fi over fantasy - Snow Crash being a guilty pleasure, along with the works of Robert J. Sawyer, Leo Frankowski's Cross-Time Engineer series, and ideally a copy of Neuromancer once I go out and buy it.
I do dig into a few fantasy series from my youth once in a while - the Greyhawk Master Wolf series by Rose Estes for one, and old Dragonlance middle school stuff when I get really bored (sinful, I know). Tolkein is good an all, but I've had my fill of it.
Yeah, I fairly recently re-read the Dragonlance 'Legends' and they remained enjoyable, though I couldn't get through the 'Chronicles'.
DeleteMy go-to re-readers are the Black Company books (as my screen name would seem to indicate), The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, and in the throes of dull grey winter, some Lovecraft . . . all things I read when I was young and still enjoy now.
ReplyDeleteI have to ask, noisms, what do you find different now about the Tad Williams books? I also read those when I was younger, and while I wouldn't call them ones I re-read a lot, I still like them.
I tried re-reading them about 5-10 years ago after having loved them as a teenager and found them very overwrought and slow-moving.
DeleteI very rarely reread fiction, but I have gone back to The Riddlemaster of Hed multiple times. I just find it so charming that I forgive all its sins.
ReplyDeleteThe entire Tolkien oeuvre (from grade school; like Christopher Lee I think at one point I read LOTR at least every year for something like thirty straight years).
ReplyDeleteThe Earthsea Cycle, including all the later ones, which I find increasingly amazing as I get older.
Dune (just the first one, before the mushrooms melted Herbert's brain).
One Dickens a year.
Patrick O'Brian: most or all of the Aubrey/Maturin books every few years (summer reading!)
History (I'm a historian): WW2 history (from when I was a kid); Caro's Robert Moses bio and the gigantic LBJ books; books about NASA; any good American history targeted at a popular audience (I'm fascinated by the academic/popular history divide).
I have to second the Bill Bryson shoutouts!
Re-reading the complete works of Caro must be quite a task!
DeleteI think it hilarious that Lovecraft is comfort reading, and apparently not just for me. Part of it is the saturation of his tentacular, necronomic themes and tropes into the everyday. Also, the campy invocation of "queer," "eldritch", "loathsome," toward those things that so alienated the Providence gentleman but are more commonplace today: human evolution, mixed-race folks, pagan religions, non-Euclidean physics ... It's notable that writers like Ligotti, who come at existential horror with much more dryness, can never achieve the status of comfort reading like HPL can.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the Gothic poetry of lines like, "It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond the river Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne in Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this rumour. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos."
DeleteI wonder what Cthulhu would make of all this?
DeleteI also didn't used to re-read much, because there are "too many books out there", but in the last couple of years I have realised the folly of this, discovering that many books only really come into their own on a second or third read (this is partly because I've discovered the work of Peter Vansittart, whose books make very little sense whatsoever on first read, and yet are so seductive... I can't help but dive in again and again, trying to retrieve some sense from them). I've also been thinking a lot about lectio divina, in which wisdom is only extracted by repeatedly chewing, slower and slower, over the same set of words. I've joined a reading group in which we're tackling William Blake's Marriage of Heaven & Hell using this approach, and the results border on revelatory. It begins to feel as though I've been wasting much of my life by only reading books once! (But, yes, I still struggle with the trade-off between depth of experience and more experience).
ReplyDeleteYou might not be surprised to hear that among the few books I have read and re-read for most of my life, even prior to this discovery, are the Viriconium series. I wouldn't exactly call it a comfort read though, the short stories in particular feel like new things each time I approach them, they keep on revealing more to me - something I recently discussed on the "This Book I Read" podcast: https://beyondcataclysm.co.uk/podcast/viriconium-with-dan-sumption/
I do, however, have a lot of comfort radio dramas and comedies, some of which I must have listened to hundreds of times by now.
I certainly think this is true of IMPORTANT books. There are some books of philosophy, religion etc that do yield repeated insights with every single read. And often this insights are reliant on having read something else and juxtaposed the two.
DeleteFace in the Frost: a perennial favorite.
ReplyDeleteA perennial disappointment: every other John Bellairs book. They're good, but none of them scratch the same itch.
I suppose it's a good job that Face in the Frost is the only one I've read!
DeleteOut of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. Although as an adult I appreciate the virtues of the other books in the trilogy, the pure adventure of the first brings me straight back to borrowing it from my church library as a child and reading it instead of listening to the sermon.
ReplyDeleteThe Red Hourglass by Gordon Grice. Excellent nature writing, strangely this book helped me overcome my fears of creepy crawlies. I haven't reread it in a few years, perhaps I need to change that.
Disappointment? I read Kurt Vonnegut religiously in high school, at one point reading Breakfast of Champion five times in two weeks. I revisited Cat's Cradle a few years ago and it was robbed of any impact on me.
The Red Hourglass sounds interesting!
Delete