Monday, March 15, 2010

Comfort reading

I’ve not been feeling too chipper lately, and reading Home by Marilynne Robinson didn’t help. It was beautifully written, but far too sad for me. Fortunately, when I was in the Bakewell Bookshop on Friday looking for a map of the Llangollen Canal (but that’s another story)  I found The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. I am a quarter of the way in, and finding it delightful.

I have certain books I return to when I am feeling in need of a warm blanket for my bruised soul, or when I am ill, and these are a few of them:

Leaving Home by Garrison Keillor

Homestead by Rosina Lippi

Part of the furniture by Mary Wesley (the only one of Mary Wesley’s books I like)

The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M.Delafield

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson

I have more but I am going to stop. If the list gets any longer you will realise how often my soul gets bruised.

p.s. Jane always maintains that we wrote Plotting for Beginners to cheer me up. But then Jane is very good at fiction.

Pile of Plotting for Beginners

2 comments:

Samc said...

Ballet Shoes ! I am amazed and delighted it's still in print. I also loved a trilogy of books by Noel Streatfield about a girl called Gemma who wanted to be famous ( but she was talented not some Katie Price type) who lived with her cousins... Can't recall the titles and I had old copies unearthed at a jumble sale.

lyn said...

I agree with you about comfort reading. I went through a stage last year where I was only reading new books by authors I already knew & loved. As my favourite authors are mostly middlebrow Englishwomen who wrote between the wars, I was reading lots of Delafield, Sayers, Tey, etc. Ballet Shoes is another favourite. Sometimes only the familiar will do.