Quick wins and comfort reads

‘Quick win’ books and ‘comfort reads’ are similar concepts with differing agendas, but which share a common raison d’etre in my view: you are fond of reading but don't like lingering too long with one book. Here's a few thoughts from me on the subject.

We’re all voracious readers in my little family. My son is only two and a half and he’s been read to daily pretty much since birth. He’s already started to ‘read’ books to us for himself, and to be honest the stories he’s telling from these books – whilst following the general lines of the established story – sound much more exciting and lively the way he tells them!

My wife adores a broad spectrum of novels, with a particular fondness for Agatha Christie, Narnia, some of the classic Nineteenth Century ‘chick lit’ and also Harry Potter.

I tend to read Doctor Who and related books at the moment, because I’m still catching up on published fiction I should have been reading regularly between 1991 and 2005 but was too busy reading English Literature classics at the time for my A-Level, undergraduate and Postgraduate studies! But the perceived quality of the reading material makes little difference to my point.

My son has a lot of books. A lot. We try to read new and different books to him, and during the day he can be very receptive to this. However, at bedtime he has his favourites, his ‘comfort reads’. So Room On The Broom, Whatever Next, Peace At Last, and Alfie Gets In First get read over and over again on an almost nightly basis, occasionally punctuated with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, A Squash and A Squeeze, The Snail and The Whale, The Gruffalo’s Child,  Monkey Puzzle and a few others. He knows what he likes and what he’s comfortable with.

Similarly I see my wife returning time and time again to read the Harry Potter books, or The Chronicles of Narnia, mixed in with the mass of Agatha Christies – of which she also has her repeat favourites. These are her comfort reads; reading these isn’t necessarily about discovering something new, it’s about popping in to see an old friend who isn’t going to suddenly surprise or upset you. You know what’s going to happen over the page but you like the safety and security of knowing that and you can just enjoy being with the characters as they journey through the story, fully aware of how it will all end up. And if not everyone in the book is going to make it through to the end you can cherish the times you do spend with them. Your relationship to the text still changes each time you return to it, but the comfort comes from you as reader feeling that you are in control.

It’s because reading is an immersive pastime; it’s a relationship between the writer, the reader and the words on the page. Sometimes that relationship can be about surprise, or threat, or laughs, or sorrow; sometimes those reactions are totally dependent on this being the first time you’ve read that particular book, and sometimes as a result people may think ‘been there, done that, move on’. But there are times in everyone’s lives where there is a lot going on, and the resultant stress and strain can mean that you don’t necessarily want to read a new book right now (or discover a new album or watch a new film – the same applies). You want predictable escapism, you want the comfort of knowing that no matter what else is going on that may or may not be under your control in ‘real life’, that there on the page during your cramped commute or half an hour’s down time with a cuppa is what you know and love, somewhere familiar that you can lose yourself.

With comfort reads it’s not necessarily important how long the book is, or how long it will take you to finish it. However, because you are comfortable with the text you will tend to finish a comfort read more quickly when you re-visit it.

But purely on length alone, enter the ‘quick win’.

Quick win reads fall into two distinct categories:

• short books
• books you’ve read before and know won’t take you long to get through.

I know that these aren’t hard and fast rules – I made the mistake years ago of choosing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a supposed quick win during a Nineteenth Century Culture module at University. Ay caramba! A pleasant afternoon’s read, I thought, over a coffee or two. Several days, plenty of coffee cups and ninety five difficult pages of stodgy Modernity later I finished it. Ho hum. But knowing what I’d be letting myself in for could I now pick it up and treat it as a comfort read? No, let’s not go there!

You have to love your comfort reads. You don't have to love your repeat-read quick wins, and you don't necessarily choose them for comfort.

I don’t think I have any comfort reads myself. There are books I’ve read over and over again but I don’t necessarily pick them up in times of stress or concern, I just decide that it’s about time I visited them again. So I find I’ve read Gulliver’s Travels or The Hound of The Baskervilles, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy 1-5 far more than most of the other novels I own. But I also have some all time favourite texts that I haven’t read that often but hold in very high esteem – Ulysses, Trainspotting, Dracula, Don Quixote, The Lord of The Rings amongst them. I guess I’m a predictable ‘canonist’ in that these are generally era or genre-defining texts but by the same token they are what they are for good reasons.

But whereas I don’t seek comfort in the predictable contents of a book I do have issues with how long it takes me to read some books – which is a difficult one because it’s not always the book’s fault!

‘I just couldn’t get into it’ must be one of the most common criticisms aimed at books in general. I recall at University we spent the first half of one semester studying George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I read about two hundred pages in that first six week period for that very reason - because I just couldn’t get into it, I couldn’t come to terms with the style of Eliot’s prose or engage with any of the characters. But I wasn’t able to cast it aside because it was a set text and essays beckoned. Then something happened, something between myself and the book clicked, and I raced through the remaining eight hundred or so pages in about a week. Madness! But I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, it just… was.

Generally these days when I pick up a new book I pick it up because I want to read it for whatever reason and I will finish it whether I like it or not (and be damned!) Recent reads that I haven’t enjoyed and I’ve struggled with include Ben Aaronovitch’s Genius Loci (from the Big Finish Bernice Summerfield range) and Simon A. Forward’s BBC ‘Past Doctor Adventure’ Doctor Who: Drift, featuring the Fourth Doctor and Leela. Now before people think I’m mad or suffering from some obsessive compulsive disorder I will point out these are part of a series of books and they’re not very long – Drift was 280 pages I think – so I’m not wasting great swathes of my life on some pointless endeavour. What tends to happen is these less enjoyable books take me a lot longer to get through than I’d like, so I get frustrated and restless. As a consequence I will pick up a ‘quick win’ afterwards, a shorter book that I know I can easily read in one or two days’ of commuting, that gets me back in the swing and buoyant for my next longer novel.

I tend to set myself unrealistic demands on the number of books I should read each week - but no one’s judging me except myself, so writing this down does make me think that perhaps I may be slightly mad after all…

It must be the legacy from my English Literature degrees, because I embraced the reading lists so fully.

Anyway my main source of quick wins is the old Target range of Doctor Who novelisations. I’ve been reading them since I was a boy – so that would suggest to observers that they are comfort reads. But I tend to avoid the ones I favoured years ago (mainly Fourth Doctor stories novelised by Terrance Dicks) and aim instead for something I either haven’t read before or haven’t read for decades – and there’s plenty of them. So in that respect they’re not necessarily comfort reads (even though I know the stories by now through watching the TV episodes repeatedly or listening to the off-air soundtrack CDs), but they are quick wins, and they usually leave me in a positive frame of mind for my next read.

After finishing Drift late last week I was supposed to pick up another Fourth Doctor book, Evolution by John Peel, from Virgin’s ‘Missing Adventures’ range so I could review it for a forthcoming issue of The Terrible Zodin fanzine (http://doctorwhottz.blogspot.co.uk/). But having taken the best part of two weeks to trawl through Forward’s treacly prose, regularly losing track of who was who and where and why (and ending up thinking ‘what the hell, I’ll just see what happens when I get to the end’) I didn’t want to dive into another 250-odd page novel straight away; I wanted something snack size, around 150 pages that I knew I could read in a couple of days – I wanted a ‘quick win’. My quick win of choice was Ian Marter’s The Ark In Space, because it was maintaining the Fourth Doctor theme and I recalled it being a great book from my teenage years. It was indeed, but there’ll be more about that in a separate post.

I suppose where the lines cross for me with quick wins and comfort reads is that, because I set myself demanding targets in terms of how many books I should be reading (and reading properly, not skim-reading), the quick wins give me satisfaction that I am meeting my own expectations. And although the words are new the stories in these quick wins are familiar, comfortable. But then with a book it’s the words that count as much as the story and if the words aren’t familiar how can it be comfortable..?

I don’t know. But one thing is clear to me from all this: both 'comfort reads' and 'quick win' books provide a much needed psychological boost and support to us all, no matter how old we are and how much we choose to read.