Has this ever happened to you?
For a long time - say a few months towards the end of last year - I completely got out of the habit of reading. Of course, I was still reading books, one or two a week, but firstly they were mainly tried and tested favourites and secondly none of them were in any danger of taxing my brain. I was re-reading my comfort authors: Georgette Heyer, Dorothy L. Sayers, Marian Keyes, and also Jilly Cooper (the short romances, not the blockbusters), Sophie Kinsella, Lauren Weisberger, Hester Browne and essentially anything I could read with my brain half-asleep.
There's nothing wrong with this kind of lazy reading, but it is addictive, and it can result in a kind of reader's block, where you become unable to face anything that looks even remotely difficult, or unfamiliar, or dense, and go running back to your comfort books. I managed to break my reader's block with a couple of books: one was was Lionel Shriver's Double Fault and one was Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride. Both of these have strong narrative lines that led me out of my block, by promising me, in return for some degree of concentration, a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. I couldn't have gone straight from Marian Keyes to, say, John Banville's The Sea (beautifully written and not much happens, by all accounts).
I don't think comfort reading is something that other people can recommend to you - you have to find your own comfort books. But it probably helps to receive some recommendations for reader's block. Is anyone out there feeling blocked at the moment? Stuck in a rut? If so, I hope to recommend some books to help ... stay tuned.
