I was two when I learned to “read.”  Mom claimed that as a toddler I woke her up at 5 a.m. to read alphabet books. Certainly we had plenty of books. Every time we went to the store we bought  Golden books, inexpensive editions of fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and animal stories. 

No one was ever more relieved than Mom when her child learned to read and she could sleep in.

In the early mornings, I lost myself in Nancy Drew, Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, Lord of the Rings, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Nobody’s Garden (recommended to me by the children’s librarian), Black Beauty (the saddest horse book ever), and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind.

In fourth grade, I discovered E. Nesbit (stuffily catalogued under her married name, E. Bland, at the library). The library only had two of her books, but a local bookstore carried them, so I requested them for Christmas and birthdays. And I also loved  Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin series, and one year received The Moon by Night, a chronicle of the Austin family’s camping trip across America. Vicky gets her period!

Reading is a comfort, especially in these tough times. Below is a list of favorite comfort books for all ages.

I loved Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator, a brilliant, plot-driven novel, with many, many fox-hunting scenes, and even a lawsuit involving poisoned foxes. Perhaps there are too many fox-hunting scenes, but it is well worth reading for Trollope’s portrait of Arabella, a pathological liar who schemes to trick wealthy Lord Rufford into marriage- without first breaking up with her fiance, Mr. Morton. He is her back-up plan!  There is also a wicked Arabella in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the coarse older woman who seduces and marries him when Jude is is a young, hopeful aspiring classicist.

E. Nesbit’s The Wonderful Garden. Most of Nesbit’s books are fantasies; this one is not. In this whimsical novel, the three C’s, Caroline, Charles, and Charlotte, find a secret door in a walled garden and come upon an old book, The Language of Flowers. They consult it when they want to communicate via bouquets. Whether by magic or coincidence, the flowers and herbs alleviate distress.  In some ways, The Wonderful Garden reminds me of Nesbit’s adult classic, The Lark, the story of two young women who have lost all their money and now sell flowers from their garden.

Were you a fan of Eleanor Cameron’s Mushroom Planet series? They are in-print, but I much prefer her realistic novels, which, alas, are out-of-print.  She began her career with an adult novel,  The Unheard Music (1950), which was well-reviewed, but did not sell well. It is partly based on her experience as a librarian, but there is also at least one down-and-out musician. I had to track it down by library loan. I may have borrowed the only copy in America!

And then Cameron began to write successful children’s books. A Spell Is Cast, a kind of homecoming nostos novel, is a strange, splendid example of her ability to weave adult themes into a children’s book. The protagonist, Corey, an orphan raised by a ditzy guardian, is sent to California to live with her grandmother and uncle – yet no one picks her up at the airport, so they’re not off to a good start. No wonder she falls ill in this strange house, though she has friends out of the house. While she is ill, she has a dream reminiscent of Salvador Dali’s dream scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.

If you’re fond of animal books, I recommend all-ages books like Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, the charming story of Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad; and Clifford D. Simak’s forgotten science fiction classic, City.  In Simak’s charming novel, the last beings on earth are talking dogs and robots. The dogs are archivists, puzzled by eight extant human tales. They wonder, Did humans ever exist? In the faux preface, a scholar of doggish literature quotes the scholar Rover.  “Rover believes that in the first tale we are dealing with is almost pure myth and that as a result no situation or statement can be accepted at face value, that the entire tale must be filled with symbolism to which the key has long been lost.”

Let me know your favorite comfort reads!