The Comfort Reads Podcast (Patreon)

Thank you for sharing your favourite comfort reads.

Your answers were incredibly insightful and touching.

There were some recurring favourites (Tolkien, Dickens, Kerouac), and some lovely surprises from the cosy nooks of world literature.

These are the books we curl up with when in need of comfort and courage.

I've provided audio timestamps because this was a long show (1 hour 24 mins), so feel free to jump about to anything that interests you.

The first 20 minutes are a general discussion on what makes a comfort read and the value of escapism. Then I'm reading and responding to your great comments for the next hour. Then we finish on my own personal comfort reads.

Audio Timestamps:

• 0:00 what is a comfort read?
• 6:00 the value of escapism and vicarious experience
• 8:00 How to read Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
• 9:00 imaginative literature as gifting perspective
• 10:30 how fiction helped my grandmother towards the end
• 11:20 how I started reading Shakespeare and Dickens
• 13:00 comfort reads as a return to childhood
• 14:00 quests and companionship
• 15:00 the healing power of laughter
• 16:30 The Bookseller’s Tale
• 18:00 solitary vs communal reading
• 19:45 reading your great comments
• 20:20 The Lord of the Rings and fighting cancer
• 25:30 the novels of Kurt Vonnegut
• 28:00 The Trouble with Being Born
• 29:00 the books that live eternally on our nightstands
• 30:00 is Nietzsche a comfort read?
• 31:39 Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
• 32:00 reading the writers of the Beat Generation
• 35:00 Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Hugo, and French Symbolism
• 36:00 how Kerouac inspires young writers
• 36:30 Wuthering Heights and Little Women
• 37:30 Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
• 38:20 the magic of rereading the books we love
• 39:00 canons as mnemonic device
• 40:00 books as safe spaces
• 41:20 Oscar Wilde and gothic literature
• 41:30 Proust, book slumps, and serendipity
• 44:45 Eric Ambler, Theodor Fontane, Thomas Mann, Arthur Wood
• 47:30 more Kurt Vonnegut recommendations
• 48:42 brilliant first lines and the first UK lockdown
• 49:00 Alessandro Baricco, Ted Hughes, Homer,
• 50:30 the consolation of poetry
• 52:00 Philip Pullman and Paradise Lost
• 54:00 comfort authors and genres
• 55:00 tone and atmosphere in science fiction and fantasy
• 56:00 is Anna Karenina a comfort read?
• 56:30 Emerson on History
• 57:00 Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle
• 57:40 the novels of Charles Dickens
• 1:00:00 reading traditions as the seasons change
• 1:00:30 Iain M. Banks and times of no responsibility
• 1:02:00 another vote for The Lord of the Rings
• 1:03:53 the New Testament and spiritual wisdom literature
• 1:05:30 Herman Hesse’s Siddharta
• 1:06:20 another vote for Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
• 1:08:00 C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• 1:09:00 The Hobbit and writing one’s own runes
• 1:09:30 The Lord of the Rings and literary rites of passage
• 1:11:11 J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
• 1:12:00 another vote for On the Road
• 1:13:00 revealing my own personal favourite comfort reads

Happy listening and reading!