johnny9fingers (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
johnny9fingers) wrote2010-05-11 11:44 am
johnny9fingers) wrote2010-05-11 11:44 am
To read or to reread....not much of a question.
Whenever I get low I read, or more accurately comfort reread.
Over the years my comfort rereading books have been many and varied, though with some obvious similarities. The first comfort book I can remember was LOTR and I must be candid here....I was about seven or eight. LOTR lasted me until I was almost thirteen, but by then the list had grown to include C S Lewis's Narnia books, and Kenneth Grahame's 'Wind in the Willows'; the latter of which for me still retains its charm.
In my late teens I was dreadfully pompous and read anything supposedly 'difficult'. Y'know the scene: pretentious youth with a copy of Ulysses in his pocket, pontificating on the nature of art, literature, and rock 'n' roll. At different times I have reread for comfort all of Hornblower, Aubrey/Maturin, Shakespeare, Eliot's poetry, Homer (in translation, alas), Jane Austen's oeuvre (especially 'Persuasion'), Wodehouse, Waugh, and a few others: all of which brings me to my latest comfort reread of choice: Anthony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time' sequence.
Though I dip into Montaigne, and have ploughed through Proust, there are few extended pleasures that have assuaged my sorrow in and of the world quite as much as Powell: maybe Wodehouse and O'Brian of the C20th English novelists. But as of now Powell is my choice, and is as good for me as any SSRI.
I'd love to have been Nick Jenkins (the beautifully detached and dry observer), but alas know I'm merely an inferior avatar of Trapnel, dammit: and without his vast technical knowledge. But it could be worse: I could have turned out like Widmerpool.
What comfort books do other folk have, I wonder?
Over the years my comfort rereading books have been many and varied, though with some obvious similarities. The first comfort book I can remember was LOTR and I must be candid here....I was about seven or eight. LOTR lasted me until I was almost thirteen, but by then the list had grown to include C S Lewis's Narnia books, and Kenneth Grahame's 'Wind in the Willows'; the latter of which for me still retains its charm.
In my late teens I was dreadfully pompous and read anything supposedly 'difficult'. Y'know the scene: pretentious youth with a copy of Ulysses in his pocket, pontificating on the nature of art, literature, and rock 'n' roll. At different times I have reread for comfort all of Hornblower, Aubrey/Maturin, Shakespeare, Eliot's poetry, Homer (in translation, alas), Jane Austen's oeuvre (especially 'Persuasion'), Wodehouse, Waugh, and a few others: all of which brings me to my latest comfort reread of choice: Anthony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time' sequence.
Though I dip into Montaigne, and have ploughed through Proust, there are few extended pleasures that have assuaged my sorrow in and of the world quite as much as Powell: maybe Wodehouse and O'Brian of the C20th English novelists. But as of now Powell is my choice, and is as good for me as any SSRI.
I'd love to have been Nick Jenkins (the beautifully detached and dry observer), but alas know I'm merely an inferior avatar of Trapnel, dammit: and without his vast technical knowledge. But it could be worse: I could have turned out like Widmerpool.
What comfort books do other folk have, I wonder?