A little bit of everything that’s been giving me comfort lately, because why not.
Reading
I’ve blogged about comfort reading before (one, two), but here are a few I didn’t mention…
Becky Chambers: To be honest, I bounced off her space opera series, but I gave her a second chance with her solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built and her writing worked much better for me in a shorter format. Hopeful, inclusive futures that don’t have giant stakes, just quiet travels and conversations and tea. Will definitely be picking up the sequel (A Prayer for the Crown-Shy).
Angel Martinez: Another author of hopeful, inclusive futures, with a good dose of humour and adventure. My favourite of the three I’ve read so far is Safety Protocols for Human Holidays, a sweet and funny queer romance novella.
Elizabeth Peters: I don’t know why I didn’t devour her entire Amelia Peabody series long ago, because it’s right up my alley, but I finally read the first one this year. British lady adventurer! Ancient Egypt! Archaeology! Banter! Unreliable narrator! (Not that she’s lying, but she misses things, especially things to do with emotions. Not unlike Murderbot — another comfort read.) I grew up on a steady diet of E. Nesbit, Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, and the like, along with an Egypt obsession, so it would have been a natural progression. Oh well, I’m hooked now… And I still go back to England for comfort reads like To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis and the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik (okay, that one is globe-spanning, but the main (human) character is very English). (Oddly enough, Peters, Willis, and Novik are all American. Huh.)
In a similar vein, this year I also read my first Robin Hobb fantasy novel, having somehow missed them in my prime epic-fantasy-reading era back when I was devouring Mercedes Lackey and Anne McCaffrey and David Eddings (I think I read 12 or 15 of his before running out of steam). Interesting how that happens, isn’t it? Looking forward to a lot more of hers as well.
(Side note: I also discovered Black American SF author Octavia Butler years later than I should have…because she was never promoted or put out there as one of the best. Which she absolutely was (NOT good for comfort reading, though). I’m still salty about it.)
Things That Are Not Reading
- music — Slowly building up my collection on Bandcamp of mostly trad albums, then mainlining them to get through the day at work. Julie Vallimont’s latest, Heliotrope, is very calming…I think I listened to the whole thing three times in the first two days.
- tea — I go through phases of drinking lots of tea and then almost none for a while, roughly along with the seasons. Right now I’m “on” and enjoying fancy flavours from Teapigs.
- springtime — Here in my part of Canada, it always seems like it’s never going to arrive, and then it does. Tulips are up now, and cherry blossoms are fading. Imagine that.
- television — My spouse and I are both critique group veterans and former arts majors, so we love sitting down together to critique a show or movie. We have a terrible time finding things we like enough to watch all the way through, but we’ll watch 10 or 15 minutes of something and then have a great time dissecting it afterwards. Just us? Okay then. (Things we like enough tend to be either animated films or classics, or both.)
- pubs — The two of us have just recently started going out to pubs regularly again, like we used to in the Before Times. It’s nice. Of course we’ve been ordering in, but it’s not the same as having a burger and a drink — and fries that are actually crispy and hot — in a cozy ambiance that’s not our house.
How about you? What’s been giving you comfort lately? What books did you discover much later than you might have expected to?