Love and Tales

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about comfort reading. My reading pile being fairly huge and in process of being borrowed/lent I feel an impetus to get through the pile quite quickly. In reaction to this, and as the pile mostly consists of Serious Works, I’ve been comfort reading. In this instance the comfort comes from one of my favourite old friends that, I suspect, I shall probably read once or twice a year until I die. The book or rather books, as they come in tandem, are The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. If I wrote reviews and if I thought these required reviewing by my humble self then I would but I don’t so I won’t. Suffice to say, they rank quite highly amongst my rather worn and dog-eared favourites. If I owned any of the other fiction of Nancy Mitford then I’d quite likely read those some more and these some less. As is, I fall back on the comfort these novels when I want to read something but am not quite up to something new, when I want to curl up with a book and read but also let my mind wander and for it not to matter in the least if I’ve daydreamed my way through several paragraphs or pages.

I do an awful lot of comfort reading. Reading is one of my favourite things to do and something, I know you just can’t tell by the whole blog haunting thing, that I do rather a lot. In between the new stuff, the non-fiction, the serious fiction, the pretentious rubbish, and above all, the badly written crap that we all end up reading at some stage or other, I fall back to style and wit or characters that I’ve learned to love, even if their creators are appalling writers. In this vein, I was hugely excited to discover that Armistead Maupin has released a continuation, of sorts, of Tales of the City. I must admit that I discovered these through the TV series and subsequently read the books because, well, why not? These stories may not add to my store of knowledge, other than that of late ‘70s bathhouses in San Francisco, and are not highbrow or even terribly realistic [too many coincidences] but they are madly enjoyable and the characters are quite charming - true escapism done endearingly. And I cannot wait to find a copy and have a read.

That’s it for today kiddies, I didn’t have much more than a few fragments to say and I really can’t be bothered leaving this for later only to be forgotten entirely.