Comfort Everything, Take 2
Dear readers, this quarter of the year is always the hardest for me, and I know I’m not alone, especially with all the things going on this year. (Recently it seems like we’re saying that every year, though…) So this week I’m revisiting a topic I’ve covered before in these, um, pages: where to turn for comfort. Here are the comfort reads and comfort viewing that have been helping me get through lately. Books I’ve blogged about comfort reads before, so here are some I didn’t cover last time… Epic fantasy Although I read (and write) all over the science fiction and fantasy spectrum, I read Tolkien at a formative time, so fantasy will always be my first love. For about a decade now, I’ve been taking time around the holidays in December and into January to read epic fantasy. (No grimdark either, thank you.) This year, I read the first two books in Elizabeth Bear’s Silk Road–inspired Eternal Sky trilogy, Range of Ghosts and Shattered Pillars. Featuring a nomad prince in exile, a princess-turned-wizard, a very interesting horse, and lots of epic landscapes and cities and cultures. (CW: there’s a plague in the second book.) Book three will be next year’s read, and there’s also a sequel trilogy. (My previous epic-fantasy holiday read was N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which is breathtakingly good but 100% not a comfort read.) Historical fantasy Still in the fantasy vein: historical fantasy, roughly defined as a past era in the “real world” with…