On Comfort Books

What do you read when you need an old friend?

My husband and I bought a little Solo stove at the start of the pandemic and began the enduring tradition of sitting in front of our house every Friday evening for happy hour by the fire, where we chat with whoever wanders by. We live in a walking neighborhood, so we’ve met lots of people this way, and they have an open invitation to drop by anytime we’re out there, BYOB and BYO lawn chair.

Interesting conversations happen around the fire at what my husband dubbed Friday Front Stoop. One evening, my friend Nancy mentioned that she has a shelf of what she calls “comfort books.” This instantly piqued my curiosity, and I asked her to explain. She turns to them in the middle of the night, she said, when she wakes up “feeling cornered and anxious about challenges in my life.” That’s when she pulls one of her “comfort books” off the shelf, opens to a random page, and reads for a bit, until she can get back to sleep. Reading in the wee hours is a common back-to-sleep strategy, but I love that Nancy literally created a shelf of books that are like old friends she knows so well she can dip into them anywhere and feel right at home.

With the exception of the books I’ve taught, I rarely read a book twice, unless it’s to return after a very long absence to find it completely changed. But I understood immediately the feeling of a book you know so well that you can enter it through any door. And the idea of keeping those books on a shelf together for solace when you need it struck me as ingenious.

Of course, we started asking one another what our comfort books are. Here are a few:

My first choice was Walden. As I’ve admitted before, I have a bit of a crush on Henry David Thoreau. Walden is one of those books I know pretty well because I’ve taught excerpts from it, but I’ve read it several times on my own, too. I have favorite passages, but I could also open to something less familiar and it would still be comforting because Thoreau’s whole project of slowing down and paying attention and leaving himself plenty of time to think is calming, and it invites me to do the same.

Another choice for me would be Little Women. It’s not an unusual assertion to make, but I feel as if I’m coming of age alongside Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy when I enter Louisa May Alcott’s most famous novel. In a way, I did. My memory of their story operates a bit like my own memory: their experiences exist, for me, not in the chronology of a story but in the constellation of a life. I feel very much at home when I’m with them.

My husband knows his favorite book, The Scarlet Letter, inside out and upside down from having taught it so many times. He was delighted, after a decade-long hiatus, to have the chance to teach it again this semester. He loves The Scarlet Letter so much that, when we shared our reading recommendations in the family Christmas letter, his was always The Scarlet Letter, until my Aunt Meryl finally wrote back, “Enough with The Scarlet Letter!” Over the years, different characters become more important to him as his own circumstances change. This year, he said, he was really interested in Pearl for the first time because the book ends with her. He’s never thought of pulling it off the shelf in the middle of the night, but he definitely finds comfort in its deeply familiar pages.

As for the books on Nancy’s actual shelf, she later shared some details on three of them in an email:

War and Peace. The Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation is so beautifully written that I find it hypnotic. I love reading about the characters' evolution as people, especially Natasha and Pierre. I can dip into the book at any point, and say, oh, yes, that's when Pierre was thinking in this way or my goodness, I had forgotten about when Natasha was behaving in that way. Reading about how the characters change through times of war and peace gives me a sense of courage, that even though I've made mistakes in the past, that I too can evolve and find more happiness.

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, by Pema Chodron. This book first caught my attention during the pandemic because its title is so apt. Before Pema Chodron became a Buddhist nun, she was a lay person whose husband left her. In 2020, I was also going through a divorce, so I also related to the author based on the book's starting premise. But really her book is about how to handle the zooming curveballs that life throws you. She reflects on how to live in the moment and handle loneliness. She also instructs on how to meditate, which I'm still trying to learn. Her manner is so calming that inevitably, I drift off to sleep.

Body & Soul, by Frank Conroy. This book traces the development of a lonely, unschooled boy, whose mother is so absent that he is practically an orphan, into a concert pianist. The book's language is not particularly beautiful, its characters not vividly described, but I turn to it because of my personal experiences reclaiming the piano and becoming an amateur concert pianist. (Check out Nancy’s blog on this subject, Grand Piano Passion.) I particularly enjoy the passages when the hero is practicing the piano, the descriptions of his hands on the keys and the vast quantities of repertoire he is consuming, far more repertoire than I could ever hope to learn during my hour of daily practice. Since I don't have any close friends who are pianists, rereading this book is like turning to an old friend who shares my passion. 

What are your comfort books? Share them with us in the Comments section below!