Reading for comfort isn't 'doing it wrong'

Or, my reply to Irvine Welsh

Welcome to this week’s roundup of three things I’ve been enjoying, and some chat about what’s on my mind. This week, I’m thinking about the purpose of reading.

• 🍑 Lipton Peach Iced Tea. I went for a long walk with a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago, and her packed lunch contained a bottle of this. I seem to forget every year how much I enjoy it, and how much it tastes of summer. So even as I’m writing this on a somewhat chilly train, with an overcast sky out of the window, I feel as though I might well be somewhere near the Med.

• 📕 I Kissed Shara Wheeler - Casey McQuiston. (ad - Amazon affiliate link) Ahead of the release of The Pairing later this summer (which I was lucky enough to get an early review copy of - and I can tell you it’s everything you want it to be!), I finally read McQuiston’s previous book, a YA ’romantic comedy about chasing down what you want, only to find what you need.’ There’s a reference in the text to John Green’s Looking For Alaska, and I’d describe it as ‘Looking For Alaska, but extremely queer’. Really great fun and perfect to read in this end-of-school-year season. A proper coming-of-age novel.

• 🥗 Big salad, chips and wine. It’s big salad, chips and wine season! Something I enjoy every summer is to have a big salad (preferably a Chicken Caesar or something similar) with a side of chips and a glass of crisp white wine. I can’t explain why it’s so satisfying, but it is. (This week’s version: Nando’s)..

Trainspotting writer Irvine Welsh is touring around the press at the moment, promoting his new book, Resolution. It’s being pitched as ‘propulsive’, and I’m sure will be on plenty of sun loungers this summer. It’s not his book I want to talk about, though, but instead a comment that he made as part of the Guardian’s The Books Of My Life (a sort of literary Desert Island Discs) interview feature.  He mostly gives relatively long and interesting answers; I agree, for example, with his point that books you dislike can be really ‘useful to you as a writer.’ But there’s one answer that I flinched on reading, and it set off the train of thought I wanted to share with you this afternoon.

My comfort read: If reading gives you comfort, you’re not doing it right.

There’s no one reason why this made me recoil - and I have to admit it was very smartly chosen by the Guardian as the title of the piece, because it made me click through to an interview with a writer I’m otherwise not particularly interested in.

On a surface level, it sounds pretty flippant and rehearsed - I get the impression that this is something Welsh has said in bars and at dinner parties, over a glass of something expensive, to groups of adoring fans and friends. It’s hard to define authenticity - there have been essays and books written on the subject - but inauthenticity is somewhat easier to spot. As the saying goes, you know it when you see it - and I think I see it here.

But there’s a deeper reason I dislike it. If you’ve spent much time with me before, you’ll know I love a comforting read, and romances are my happy place. One of the nicest things about the established tropes of romances and rom-coms is that you know from the first tenth of the book roughly what the ending will be. What’s upper grabs is how the author will take you there - what fun and games the characters will have, what the unexpected third-act conflict will be. Within that foundational framework of the genre, you’re free to relax and enjoy the shenanigans. (I firmly believe that all the very best rom-coms can be summarised with ‘and then shenanigans ensue’).

Welsh’s statement that ‘If reading gives you comfort, you’re not doing it right,’ then, seems to ignore the very real - and necessary - comfort that reading brings to millions of people around the globe. Maybe he’s getting all the comfort he needs from different sources - but that just shows, to me, some amount of unacknowledged privilege. Some people get all the challenge they need in life from trying to make ends meet, or taking care of their families. I’m lucky enough not to be in that situation, but with my day job in climate communications, I’m constantly somewhere in the overlap between angry, frustrated, and disheartened. Just as I might soothe myself with a hot bubble bath, or a single-portion risotto I’ve stirred into life just for me, I might also burrow into a nest of blankets and pillows to open a new comfort read. Sometimes it’s the experience of reading, too, which adds to the comfort. Some of my favourite memories involve reading aloud to a loved one, or curling up quietly with my book and a cup of tea, and my mum in arm’s reach.

The other aspect is to do with the purpose of art. At first, I thought, “he’s applying the experience of looking at art as an artist, and saying that that’s how everyone else should engage with the arts,” but I think it’s more than that. It’s that there are multiple purposes of art itself. As a writer, I know this - my aim in these weekly newsletters is almost always to make you smile, and sometimes to think a little bit. I’m not setting out to write incisive analyses of our political landscape or calls to action for environmental protest. If reading what I write gives you comfort, then I’m doing it right.

When I think about art that challenges me, I think about my very favourite painting in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection: Ken Currie’s Three Oncologists. It shows three expert doctors, looking back from the darkness between what look like hospital or operating theatre drapes, with a look of hopelessness and defeat. There is blood on their hands and their eyes are empty. It speaks to the limitations of humanity, and how - even when we know it may not work - we still try or best and work our hardest to make a difference. When I lived in Edinburgh, I used to go to the Portrait Gallery and sit on the bench conveniently placed in front of that painting, and just sink into it. In a recent episode of the Strong Sense of Place podcast, Mel Joulwan credited Dave with saying that ‘sometimes a short story is like a piece of dark chocolate - you just let it sit on your tongue’. That’s how I feel about this painting, and about a lot of poetry - and sometimes that piece of dark chocolate is strong and bitter, but no less rewarding for that.

Sometimes art that I go into expecting to be entertained, or comforted, will also challenge or educate me - and vice versa - which is fine, as long as it’s also fulfilling the main purpose I’m engaging with it for. I loved the 2009 BBC tv series Desperate Romantics which is all about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (“A maverick group of revolutionary artists whose scandalous love lives rocked the gossip-filled halls of Victorian London”), their loves, their loves, and their art. As well as being entertained, it made me think a lot about the role of women in art and literature (one of the subplots is about Effie Ruskin, later Millais, and her disappointing first marriage), and while I’m sure it made various amendments to ‘true history’ in order to tell a rollicking story, it set me off on what’s now 15 years of fascination with Pre-Raphaelite and Romantic art. Had I not seen that show, I’d likely not have taken the British Romantic Poetry study unit I did in my year abroad, for example, or dragged my grandad to the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the Barber Institute when I spent time staying with him when I was 17.

Romance novels, too, my ultimate comfort read, have taught me more about myself and the world around me than I imagine Irvine Welsh would ever believe.

So, in short - and I say this respectfully - up yours, Mr Welsh.

Speak soon,

Lily

If you liked this, you might also like my explanation of my bread-based sorting system for books:

White bread - brown bread - iced buns