Comfort Reading
What are you reading that is bringing you comfort during this pandemic?
When Amy (Mama Scout) asked me about what I’m reading during these troubling times of the pandemic, my first thought was, what am I NOT reading? As the spaciousness within my life has opened up, I’m grateful to be able to slow down and lose myself in practices that feed my soul.
I read the news, maybe once every two days, to keep abreast of developments around the world. I’ve always read world news, as I might live in the UK, an island, but I believe we’re all connected, humans and non-humans. What’s happening to you, is happening to me also. We are one. I love lingering over longer articles and reports in The Guardian, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Also Orion Magazine is releasing daily previously unreleased articles from it’s archives to read for free. These are a welcomed gift.
My guilty pleasure is crime fiction. After a lifetime of reading about crimes happening around the world, I love Nordic Noir, I’ve recently gotten into the mystery series with DCI Ryan set on my doorstep in the Northeast of England by L J Ross. Taking iconic buildings and monuments within the region, such as Cragside House, the Sycamore Gap tree, the bridges over the River Tyne, as the settings, a series of murders are carried out and a team of detectives, who the reader grows to love, try to solve them while trying to have normal loving relationships themselves. I love recognising places and streets and people even within the pages of these novels.
My weak spot is personal essays. Probably because I’m in the process of creating a mixed-genre memoir which includes personal essays, poetry, images, collage, quotes and photography, I gravitate to those writers I wish I could write like such as Roxane Gay, Audre Lorde and Terry Tempest Williams.
So at the moment, I’m reading Alexandra Chee, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel which is so illuminating about his time growing up, in the 80s, through identity politics and navigating his way while unbelonging. I’ve just started, Thick, a collection of essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom, which have the black woman’s body at the centre of the debate for a change. A mixture between the personal and the academic, I find myself reading sections and nodding my head or even shouting out loud, ‘Yes.’
And finally, to my shame, I’ve just restarted Becoming, by Michelle Obama, after watching the documentary on Netflix. When the memoir first came out a couple of years ago, I started it but I didn’t get far. They say you fall into a book when it’s the right time for you; when you’re ready. Well I’m ready now. I’m absorbing Michelle’s vulnerable words of wisdom, checking in and checking myself. Reasons for reading; to keep checking in with myself, how I’m feeling, what is what I’m reading bringing up in me. At the same time as checking myself, doing the work on myself, to make sure I’m moving through this world as the best version of me.
