Booking Through Thursday: Comfort Food

Okay . . . picture this (really) worst-case scenario: It’s cold and raining, your boyfriend/girlfriend has just dumped you, you’ve just been fired, the pile of unpaid bills is sky-high, your beloved pet has recently died, and you think you’re coming down with a cold. All you want to do (other than hiding under the covers) is to curl up with a good book, something warm and comforting that will make you feel better.

What do you read?

(Any bets on how quickly somebody says the Bible or some other religious text? A good choice, to be sure, but to be honest, I was thinking more along the lines of fiction…. Unless I laid it on a little strong in the string of catastrophes? Maybe I should have just stuck to catching a cold on a rainy day….)

Well, to be honest after all those bad things happening, I probably would not feel like reading, I'd feel like drinking several glasses of a cordial such as Frangelico (which works much better than most cold remedies). I'm a miserable patient and when I have a cold reading isn't all that appealing to me. When a beloved pet has recently died, I don't do much besides cry; even Frangelico isn't a salve. Stacks of unpaid bills make me too nervous to concentrate on reading. If I lost my job, I'd probably be frantically looking for another rather than reading. And I've been married a long time, so I can't remember the dumping thing enough to connect.

But in terms of what I read as a comfort book, it isn't generally fiction (although if I was reading a fiction book during a crisis, I could easily see using it as an escape mechanism). My favorite comfort book is one I have read many times: Mark Twain's Autobiography. It is funny, touching, timeless and true to life, all at the same time. (If I could have quickly thought of a substitute word for funny that would have fit with the alliteration...I would have.)