Together in Spirit

An online reading group ('TIS a reading group!) to bring together friends, and friends of friends, who aren't able to be in a conventional reading group due to constraints of time or geography.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Comfort reading

Oh well, I guess I have to agree with Kirsty that I don't know how she does it, Bridget Jones etc go in a genre by themselves, if only because "when my brain's fried" is such a perfect description. Val and Valerie - do you ever feel the need of such comfort reading? Your lists seem very, um, intense. I don't enjoy classic chick-lit (Fielding/Pearson without the depth) but I do an awful lot of comfort reading, usually of stuff I've read before. Rowling, Pullman, Tolkien, CS Lewis, Elizabeth Goudge, Helen Fielding, Allison Pearson... Very highbrow, I DON'T think! But I need more than one book on the go at a time, to cater for how fried my brain is/n't at any given moment.

Kirsty - quite agree about the great bit in I don't know. It made me read the book in the first place. Except it was the "they can't just eat sweetcorn all the time" bit which got me. As the mother of sons who would cheerfully eat nothing else if given the opportunity, and - Pearson's masterstroke - if I wasn't here would do their energetic best to convince John that Mummy let them just eat sweetcorn...

But what do the rest of you read and re-read for comfort? Or am I weird in this?