Come with your broken dreams and your ruined fancies

[sovay]

I dreamed last night that I asked for comfort reading recommendations and came away from the bookstore with a recently reprinted YA novel about a crew of downed airmen raising a baby in a German POW camp in World War II (a childhood favorite of several people in the dream) and a relatively new lesbian mermaid romance with a gorgeous tropical cover (almost certainly influenced by this gifset and photoset). I was looking forward to reading both of them and was somewhat put out when instead I was woken by Harvard Vanguard calling to remind me of a doctor's appointment tomorrow at nine in the morning.

Now I'm just curious. What do people read when they want comfort reading? I re-read Strong Poison (1930) right before the 'Thon and am three-quarters of the way through Have His Carcase (1932), which very possibly counts.

Comments

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

The same books, over and over again. The Flat Earth series, by Tanith Lee. "The Hollow Land" by William Morris. Baltimore by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. Nine Princes In Amber by Roger Zelazny. I remember a bad night when I read and reread the scenes with Corwin rotting in jail having lost everything including his eyes. I can't call it anything but comfort reading, and it certainly made me feel a lot better, but I accept that I may require different things of my comfort reads than other people do.

Dorothy L. Sayers makes perfect sense to me. I can go back and back to her books and get a little something different every time. A comfort read seems to need to be repeatable and complicated.