Book Shelf: Comfort Reads

Four books that feel like a warm hug

When the news cycle is distressing, reading and engaging is necessary and responsible. But reading for pleasure can also offer the chance to escape, to zip into the skin of another person living another life. I’ve found it difficult to find new soothing and cosy media though (which is why ‘comfort watching’ old shows and returning to dog-earred paperbacks is so appealing): How do you know a book is comforting before reading it? How can you trust it will be a balm, not a burden? To help, here are a handful of five-star reads that felt like a warm hug to me:

Tom Lake, Ann Patchett

One of my favourite books of the year. Tom Lake is told from Lara’s perspective, as she tells a story to her three grown daughters, gathered together on the family’s cherry orchard during COVID (if you, like me, don’t really wanna read about the pandemic in fiction yet, don’t worry - Patchett handles it so subtly, the words ‘COVID’ or ‘pandemic’ don’t even feature, from memory!).

As they go to work everyday picking cherries, their imaginations travel back in time, to Lara’s summer acting for a theatre company called Tom Lake, alongside Peter Duke. Her romance with Duke is fascinating to her girls, the details delicious; he went on to become a movie star, and their mother dated him as he was on the cusp of such fame!

Patchett so deftly weaves together the past and the present to create a story that feels slow yet gripping, meditative yet sparkly. It’s brilliant.

These Precious Days, Ann Patchett

Yes, Patchett is that good she features twice. This time, non-fiction: a collection of essays so precise, warm, and true that even thinking of them makes me want to pick up These Precious Days right now and re-read it.

She explores home, family, friendships, and Tom Hanks in this intimate, generous book:

“Why shouldn’t Tom Hanks write short stories? Why shouldn’t I read one? Off we went to bed, the book and I, and in doing so put the chain of events into motion. The story has started without my realizing it. The first door opened and I walked through. But any story that starts will also end. This is the way novelists think: beginning, middle, and end.”

Her writing on writing is so wise and astute that I felt a tingle re-reading this passage:

“When I’m putting together a novel, I leave all the doors and windows open so the characters can come in and just as easily leave. I don’t take notes. Once I start writing things down, I feel like I’m nailing the story in place. When I rely on my faulty memory, the pieces are free to move. The main character I was certain of starts to drift, and someone I’d barely noticed moves in to fill the space. The road forks and forks again. It becomes a path into the woods. It becomes the woods. I find a stream and follow it, the stream dries up, and I’m left to look for moss on the sides of trees.”

A note that These Precious Days does touch on aging and death, but the overall impact is life-affirming. A marvel.

Romantic Comedy, Curtis Sittenfeld

Sally is a sketch writer on a weekly comedy show, akin to SNL. Noah is a dreamy pop star who teams up with Sally as the show’s celebrity guest. But someone like him would never date someone like her, right? After all, she’s working on a sketch poking fun at the phenomenon of dorky, average men dating beautiful, accomplished women. The inverse never happens.

Romantic Comedy is another Sittenfeld success. It’s an easy, witty read, but also a sharp, intelligent exploration of the rom com genre. The pandemic features briefly at the end, but it doesn’t feel heavy-handed.

Oh William!, Elizabeth Strout

You know the feeling when you’re painfully, icily cold, and you take that first sip of hot chocolate or tea or coffee, feel it creating a thin trail of warmth down your throat and into your belly? That’s how Strout’s writing makes me feel.

I read Oh William! before its predecessor My Name is Lucy Barton, and didn’t feel like that detracted from my reading experience. I enjoyed it more than Olive Kitteridge and Lucy by the Sea. A book about the tenderness between, and bond of, Lucy and her ex-husband William, as she joins him on a journey to investigate a recently-discovered family secret.

Do you have any cosy books to recommend? I’d love to add to my comfort reading toolbox.

Until next time,

Britt