comfort books
lizziesilver will claim that I don't know what a comfort book is, but I do! Maybe I should have said more..."fun read" when it came to The Dresden Files. I see now where you might not actually call those "comforting."
:D
No, these are books on the order of, say, Pride and Prejudice. Definitely comforting. I'm sure other people would agree. You bet.
Beauty, by Robin McKinley
This is YA, and one of my oldest comfort books. It's one of the genre of books that takes good, classic fairy tales, and--like the best fanfic--messes with them out of love. You could say this is Beauty and the Beast gone wrong. Or at least haywire.
Beauty is, for one thing, not beautiful. "Beauty" is a nickname that she picked up as a small adorable child. She grew out of being adorable, but not out of the nickname. Unfortunate, that.
She has two sisters, however, who are gorgeous and slim and tall--and sweet, so she can't even hate them. The sisters seem to exist mostly to remind you of how a heroine is supposed to behave. They fall in love inappropriately and cry a lot and pine and grow artistically pale and all that. Despite this, they're really likable. Just, you know. Fragile.
Beauty, meanwhile, is mouthing off to the monster whose goodwill she is dependent upon to live and trying to throw down with incorporeal spirits of unknown strength. Oh, and studying Greek, because you have to take a break from the rage sometimes.
It's just such a bizarrely happy story. You do feel bad for the Beast by the second chapter Beauty's in the castle, though. He was looking for an innocent girl and got a tiger by the tail instead. AH HA. :D
Almost Like Being in Love, by Steve Kluger
"It's like fic,"
zephy_magnum said. "It's like fic that somehow escaped and got published. YOU MUST READ IT."
I did read it. I sat down and read it until I was finished with it, allowing nothing else to distract me in the meantime. And since then, I've probably reread it...well. Let's not go there. This book isn't going to win any awards for literary merit, but it sure as hell is fun.
Boy meets boy in high school, EPIC TEEN ROMANCE ensues. They graduate and drift apart. Twenty years later, Travis randomly decides that his life has been completely empty of meaning since high school, which is clearly because he's been missing Craig all this time, oh my God everyone he's ever dated has basically been Craig only not as awesome and WHAT HAS HE BEEN DOING WITH HIS LIFE?
And then he spends much of the rest of book hunting Craig down. By, among other things, breaking into Craig's mother's office and rummaging through her rolodex. "Someone broke into my office," she tells Craig. "Nothing was taken, but my post-its were reorganized in rainbow order." "Ah," says Craig. "That would...be Travis. Because, really, there can only be one person on Earth that insane." It would be creepy if it were anyone but Travis. However, it is Travis, and you can see--sort of--how it all made sense in his head.
Craig and Travis are surrounded by friends and relatives too amazingly cool to be real in those numbers. NO ONE could luck out that much on relatives AND friends. But the fact that none of this would ever happen in real life somehow only improves the overall effect of the book. I don't know how. I don't care, either. It's awesome in its sheer happy ridiculousness.
Steve Kluger has a handful of obsessions that appear in every single book he writes. A few of them are, in no particular order:
guys named Craig
baseball
World War II
Japanese internment
the Civil Rights movement
Broadway
Ethel Merman
Julie Andrews
lawyers
Mix and match these things, and what you come up with is bound to be pretty weird. And yet weird in such an entertaining way. ^_^
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
This is comforting in a different way from the other two. It's less "everything going right with the world" and more "the best gossip you've ever overheard in your life." If you've ever watched telenovelas, this is like that. Only more well-written and in book form. Tragically, no dramatic period costumes. ^_^
It's set in Barcelona in 1945, so it had the potential to be nothing but disturbing from start to finish (oh hai Pan's Labyrinth), but it somehow manages to be uplifting instead. Mostly. It's about a boy named Daniel, whose father is a rare book dealer, and who is trying to collect the complete works of a guy named Julian Carax. It's a frustrating search. Not least because someone seems to be finding the books one step ahead of him and destroying them. A fellow book lover can only read this and say, along with Daniel, "ARGH."
In a way, the book is about Daniel looking for books. It's also about love, war, and Victor Hugo's pen, all set against a background of epic family drama. You find yourself gasping things like, "No! It was his sister!?" out loud.
(Note: do not recommend this book for reading in public places, v.v. embarrassing, the less said the better)
Every once in a while it seems like the plot is going to descend into stupid angst, but it never does! You say, "Oh, Daniel, sweetie, don't make me hate you," and he does not!
It's a very curl-up-by-the-fire-on-a-rainy-day book. YAY.
And those are the recs!