What Is a Comfort Read?

of food and folktales and tropical snow

A book should be the axe for the frozen sea within us, Kafka said. Books should wound, disturb, and discomfort. Well, get fucked, Kafka. The newest trend in publishing is the marketing category of the “cozy”: books that promise soothing and stasis. This marketing category, though, is only the industry’s response to the preexisting discourse of Comfort Media. People talk about comfort reads, comfort watches.

Until recently, my understanding was that Comfort Media should be lighthearted, undemanding, and familiar. But I usually look for this kind of entertainment when I’m relaxed, not when I’m in distress. I don’t mind re-watching Gilmore Girls or re-reading The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but if I’m already unhappy, I’ll find their lightheartedness mocking rather than comforting.

For this reason, I assumed that I had no comfort reads or comfort watches of my own.

In fact I felt a bit smug about not having any comfort reads of my own: here I was, all superior, thawing the frozen sea. But then I remembered 2020. In the depths of the COVID pandemic, I’d check out one work of acclaimed contemporary fiction after another from the library—and then a week or two later I’d mask up and slip them guiltily into the New Orleans Public Library returns box, unfinished. Instead, I devoured Victorian novels with a real ravenousness and absorption that I thought had departed with the end of adolescence. I was completely uninterested in anything from the Modernists onward. This was a total, jarring reversal from my previous tastes. I’ve never entirely recovered, either, although I’m no longer repelled by all modern and contemporary literature. Then again, to put it lightly, the world also has not entirely recovered.

At the time I thought that my sudden shift in taste was stylistic—that in the chaos of the pandemic, I wanted the stability of the nineteenth-century novel. If I couldn’t believe in God then maybe I could believe in a deific Victorian narrator, who could cut through the uncertainty and discord and conspiracy theories about drinking bleach to tell me what was true and what was not, feed me dinner, and put me to bed.

But in hindsight, I don’t believe that style was the primary cause of this sudden change. For one thing, that explanation gives too little credit to the strangeness of pre-modernist literature, and ignores the fact that many contemporary novels are written in an essentially Victorian style anyway. Rather, I think I was at least partly drawn to these books precisely because of their relative age. I was seeking comfort, not from the stable and familiar, but from the weird and the distant.