Trust me, it’s the best way of keeping calm and carrying on in the midst of a lockdown
Whenever I am going through a period of stress – and it will surprise precisely no one that this lockdown period has been a unique stressor – I always seek succor in my comfort reads.
You know what I mean, right? Comfort reads are those books that transport me to better worlds, minutely imagined parallel universes, where all problems have resolutions, and every loose end can be niftily tied at the end of the narrative. These are books I have re-read so often that I know some of the dialogue by heart and yet the punchlines leave me chuckling each time. And these are the books that I have been turning to, to keep my spirits up, during this enforced stay-at-home period.
I am happy to report that they have done the trick quite nicely. I usually spend about an hour or so with them in the late afternoon after I have done my writing for the day and need to decompress. And I turn to them last thing at night, when I read myself to sleep. And they soothe and calm me much more than actual meditation ever does.
So, on the off chance that you may benefit from this remedy too, here’s my list of go-to books and authors. I hope they bring you the same comfort they do to me.
• I have always been a fan of Margaret Atwood, but it had been a long time since I read her seminal work, The Handmaid’s Tale. But after bingeing on the three seasons of the TV show on Amazon Prime, I had this irresistible urge to go back and re-read the book the series was based on. And I am ever so glad that I did. The sparse prose, the easy cadences, and the effortless grace of Atwood’s writing left me in awe yet again. To read this book is to see the author at the height of her powers. And marvel once more at the imagination from which the dystopian world of Gilead sprung, fully-formed and full of horror.
• The other TV series that sent me scurrying back to the book it was based on was Little Fires Everywhere on Hotstar. I had read Celeste Ng’s bestseller when it was first published but given that my memory is like a sieve these days, going back to it was like reading a new book. So, I could appreciate afresh the universe that Ng had created, with two intertwined families at the centre of the narrative, which spooled in a direction that was entirely unexpected. The show has deviated at many seminal points from the book, so even if you have seen the series, the book will still provide you with many surprises.
• I had mentioned in my last column that I intended to explore the entire oeuvre of Elizabeth George, to chart the progress of Inspector Lynley and Barbara Havers’ careers as they went about solving murders across the decades. I have since begun reading A Great Deliverance, the very first Inspector Lynley mystery, which came out way back in 1988, and I am astonished to see just how much the characters have evolved since then. In this book, for instance, Lynley is portrayed as a dashing ladies man, who has slept with most of the women in his department, and Lady Helen Clyde is described as his ‘longest-running mistress’. As someone who rejoiced at their wedding and (spoiler alert coming up!) and cried tears at Helen’s passing, this throwback was startling to say the least.
• As regular readers will know, whenever I need cheering up, my go-to author is Georgette Heyer. Her Regency romances have been a staple of my comfort reading list ever since my teenage years – and that hasn’t changed even though I am now well into my middle age. This time round, I first sought refuge in Venetia, in which the heroine of the title falls prey to the charms of a well-practiced rake, only to win his heart – and his hand – in the end. And then, I dived right into The Grand Sophy, in which the redoubtable heroine re-arranges the lives of all those around her, much to their consternation and my delight.
• Now that I am cooking more than ever, given that there is no other way to put food on the table, I keep dipping into food books to find inspiration (not recipe books, I am afraid, because I like to make things up as I go along, rather than follow in well-trodden paths). Some of the books that have provided food for thought in this period are Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat (she has a show by the same name on Netflix, which you could check out), Pasta Pane Vino by Matt Goulding, and closer home, The Flavour of Spice by my old friend Marryam H. Reshii. I like to think that the information I have gleaned from these worthy tomes has made me a better cook – the botched experiments, needless to say, are entirely of my own making.
If you too want to read yourself out of a lockdown-induced depression, then I can’t recommend comfort reading enough. Start with some of the books I have recommended, or find your own. But do read for a couple of hours every day – and no peeking at your phone while you do it. Believe me, it will make a world of difference to your day.
Whenever I am going through a period of stress – and it will surprise precisely no one that this lockdown period has been a unique stressor – I always seek succor in my comfort reads.
You know what I mean, right? Comfort reads are those books that transport me to better worlds, minutely imagined parallel universes, where all problems have resolutions, and every loose end can be niftily tied at the end of the narrative. These are books I have re-read so often that I know some of the dialogue by heart and yet the punchlines leave me chuckling each time. And these are the books that I have been turning to, to keep my spirits up, during this enforced stay-at-home period.
I am happy to report that they have done the trick quite nicely. I usually spend about an hour or so with them in the late afternoon after I have done my writing for the day and need to decompress. And I turn to them last thing at night, when I read myself to sleep. And they soothe and calm me much more than actual meditation ever does.
So, on the off chance that you may benefit from this remedy too, here’s my list of go-to books and authors. I hope they bring you the same comfort they do to me.
• I have always been a fan of Margaret Atwood, but it had been a long time since I read her seminal work, The Handmaid’s Tale. But after bingeing on the three seasons of the TV show on Amazon Prime, I had this irresistible urge to go back and re-read the book the series was based on. And I am ever so glad that I did. The sparse prose, the easy cadences, and the effortless grace of Atwood’s writing left me in awe yet again. To read this book is to see the author at the height of her powers. And marvel once more at the imagination from which the dystopian world of Gilead sprung, fully-formed and full of horror.
• The other TV series that sent me scurrying back to the book it was based on was Little Fires Everywhere on Hotstar. I had read Celeste Ng’s bestseller when it was first published but given that my memory is like a sieve these days, going back to it was like reading a new book. So, I could appreciate afresh the universe that Ng had created, with two intertwined families at the centre of the narrative, which spooled in a direction that was entirely unexpected. The show has deviated at many seminal points from the book, so even if you have seen the series, the book will still provide you with many surprises.
• I had mentioned in my last column that I intended to explore the entire oeuvre of Elizabeth George, to chart the progress of Inspector Lynley and Barbara Havers’ careers as they went about solving murders across the decades. I have since begun reading A Great Deliverance, the very first Inspector Lynley mystery, which came out way back in 1988, and I am astonished to see just how much the characters have evolved since then. In this book, for instance, Lynley is portrayed as a dashing ladies man, who has slept with most of the women in his department, and Lady Helen Clyde is described as his ‘longest-running mistress’. As someone who rejoiced at their wedding and (spoiler alert coming up!) and cried tears at Helen’s passing, this throwback was startling to say the least.
• As regular readers will know, whenever I need cheering up, my go-to author is Georgette Heyer. Her Regency romances have been a staple of my comfort reading list ever since my teenage years – and that hasn’t changed even though I am now well into my middle age. This time round, I first sought refuge in Venetia, in which the heroine of the title falls prey to the charms of a well-practiced rake, only to win his heart – and his hand – in the end. And then, I dived right into The Grand Sophy, in which the redoubtable heroine re-arranges the lives of all those around her, much to their consternation and my delight.
• Now that I am cooking more than ever, given that there is no other way to put food on the table, I keep dipping into food books to find inspiration (not recipe books, I am afraid, because I like to make things up as I go along, rather than follow in well-trodden paths). Some of the books that have provided food for thought in this period are Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat (she has a show by the same name on Netflix, which you could check out), Pasta Pane Vino by Matt Goulding, and closer home, The Flavour of Spice by my old friend Marryam H. Reshii. I like to think that the information I have gleaned from these worthy tomes has made me a better cook – the botched experiments, needless to say, are entirely of my own making.
If you too want to read yourself out of a lockdown-induced depression, then I can’t recommend comfort reading enough. Start with some of the books I have recommended, or find your own. But do read for a couple of hours every day – and no peeking at your phone while you do it. Believe me, it will make a world of difference to your day.
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