Getting Comfy

As the winter is wearing on, everything is all about comfort these days. People are putting on their comfortable winter coats and scarves (yes, even in San Francisco. I am aware that we are all wimps), they are eating comfort food, and doing "comfort things" I suppose. What those are, I can only guess. I just picture sitting by a fire, maybe cuddling, maybe drinking hot toddies.

Ladies, I would just like to say that at this moment, my schedule is almost entirely clear and open if any of you wish to pursue any of these activities with a certain charming and verbally awkward blogger. But my chimney is broken, so you have to supply the fireplace.

I find that throughout the year, I have a whole different comfort tradition: I am a comfort reader. It sounds silly perhaps, but from time to time I just feel the need to go back and read books that I know and love. Sometimes it's because I want to re-capture a feeling that a book stirs up in me, sometimes it's because I want to re-immerse myself in a world that the book creates, and sometimes it's just that I love the story so much that I want to take it all in again. I don't know if this is a unique feature to myself or not. As far as I know, a number of people are not re-readers. I'm not always, but there are a number of books that I can pick up and read pretty much any time and I know I'll be happy about it.

This came up in conversation the other day: I was discussing holiday traditions with some friends, and I mentioned that for probably about six years straight from the time I was a young teenager, I used to read Stephen King's The Shining every Christmas break. It started because it was the first chance I had to do pleasure reading after my Fall semester had ended, really. I had purchased a copy at a garage sale, and found myself so taken with it that I couldn't put the book down. It's the 100% honest truth that reading that book is when I realized I needed glasses: I'd find that reading for more than 2-3 hours at a time would give me one hell of a headache, so I'd have to stop reading, little did I know it was due to eye strain from my farsightedness. But I digress. I read that book in a few days, and decided then and there to make it an annual tradition, and I think that, especially given my recent lack of employment, this is the perfect chance to re-kindle that tradition.

There are other titles of course, the Scott Pilgrim series being a prime example, where I just feel like it is totally worth my time to go back and read it all again. Specifically in that case, they are quick reads, so I can usually knock it all out in a day or two. On the Road is obviously an "A-number-one" example (between pleasure reading and thesis prep, I have got to be nearing my twentieth read of that one).

But I'm not here to catalog books I read all the time, (you can check out my GoodReads account for that). Rather, I am curious about why certain books are so re-readable, and if I'm a freak for having reading habits like this. Is it a book nerd thing? (I hesitate to say "scholar" because if you know me, you know that's not a term I'd usually apply to myself) Is it something else? Is it something that authors actually strive for? I know this seems disjointed, but I guess I just have to keep hearkening back to the base question: am I alone in my comfort reading repetition? I know a lot of people who re-read books, but are there people like me out there who re-re-re-re-read stuff? If any of you out there have an opinion, please chime in, I'd love to hear what you have to say.