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In the midst of this busy holiday season, consider adding one more thing to your schedule: Virtual Book Club!  We will gather on Friday, December 10 at 7:30 P.M. CST to discuss A Perilous Undertaking (Veronica Speedwell #2) by Deanna Raybourn.  This series, like book club, is a fun hang that will be a welcome respite from all the other chaotic things going on in your life (just me?  All good, but show up to keep me company maybe?!).  If you’re planning to join us, sign up here so we can email you the link Friday afternoon.  Can’t make it?  Slide into our DMs with what day / time would be better for you, title or genre suggestions for 2022, and / or ideas on what you’d like us to bring to the blog in 2022!

Last time, I wrote about books I’ve read in November that didn’t meet expectations.  While this week’s review is one of them, it’s not one that disappointed me, like the others.  I haven’t read Matt Haig before, but regularly look longingly at a copy of The Midnight Library, which I know is a fantastic novel, so I expected The Comfort Book would also be a fictional tale.  Nope.  It’s non-fiction, but while that is a failed expectation, it’s not necessarily a problem, especially when the introduction helps me to reset, as this book does.  The Comfort Book is a compilation of things Haig wrote down to help comfort himself, things he learned when times were rough, really rough.  It doesn’t have a clear structure, even though it is divided into parts, and you could easily read this book straight through, or open to a random page and read for a bit, then do it again the next time.  I read it straight through (mostly, I did need a fiction going at the same time), and intend on rereading it, but next time, I won’t be bingeing it like a novel.  I’ll pick it up when I need some comfort, read for a bit, then put it down until I want another dose.  

I find it ironic that The Comfort Book was published on my birthday this past summer.  I don’t recall the day or what I did (and now I do on my editing read, hush Ashley, it was boring and adultish, except for a fantastic lunch date), but that probably means I could have used some comfort then too (definitely, always).  But it’s not just comfort, it’s also reframing, solace, and reminders of our place in the world as people, of what we do and do not have control of, and of how often we have to reach the bottom before we can turn, and then return to the light.  While The Comfort Book is listed as self-help, that doesn’t feel wrong, and it also doesn’t feel right.  It feels more like an ode to the modern person who is struggling and just needs a little something to remind them to keep baby stepping along because if we can do that, we can make it through.  

I’m so delighted we chose The Comfort Book to start off our month of comfort reads.  It was a joy of a read I’m giving 4 emphatic stars.  I’ve already got this title on my wish list and my to-gift list because I want a dead tree copy to reread slowly, and a reader friend needs her own copy too!  With that, I’ll leave you with two of my favorite sentences:

“Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.”

“Get a routine baggy enough to live in.”

What’s a book that you read and then wanted to reread immediately, but perhaps differently?

~Nikki 

Darling Readers, like Nikki I was pleasantly surprised as I settled in with Matt Haig’s The Comfort Book. I knew it was a non-fiction title, but I didn’t know anything about the author and his journey, about anything else he had written (besides The Midnight Library which I have not read). Matt Haig is an English author of books for children and adults and he lives in Brighton, UK, with partner and fellow writer Andrea Semple and their two children. Besides this year’s The Comfort Book, Haig’s other non-fiction titles include his 2015 memoir Reasons to Stay Alive and the 2018 follow up about living in a modern, anxious world, Notes on a Nervous Planet. His fiction works for adults include 2013’s The Humans and 2017’s How To Stop Time. Let’s not skip over his children’s fiction titles, specifically 2015’s picture book A Boy Called Christmas, the film of which was released just in time for Christmas on Netflix! I might need to borrow some littles with whom to read and watch the movie, A.A. to the rescue!

But, besides all that work he has obviously done, this newest book, compiled and written during the first English lockdown in 2020, is the first book I have read by him, and it most certainly will not be the last. I, too, want a shelf copy to open at random on hard days, to be reminded that there’s always hope in the anxious, difficult, and dark times. This book comes with its own playlist at 18% in the Kindle version, which a kind soul has already compiled and made available on Spotify, so I give it to you here, and I highly recommend listening to it while you read. I’ve listened to the playlist after finishing the book, and there’s not one song on there that doesn’t instill a little bit of goodness and light to my heart. Much like every page of this book.

Haig admits to the darkness, both in him and in the world, but wants to focus on the things that see us through those dark times. He knows, after making it through suicidal moments and other bouts with depression, that it’s a season of feelings that occur (much like Wintering made us feel last month) and that looking for the good things in the present will get us through to the future. I will also put some of my favorite quotations from the book at the end of my review, but I wanted to also share this online article from The Guardian. In it, Haig is interviewed about The Comfort Book and he said one thing I want to share directly: “I’ve had people mock everything I write as ‘tea towel wisdom’, so for The Comfort Book my publishers are going to do a tea towel with one of the quotes. I embrace all that.” I just want the dang tea towel, guys. Where can I buy it?

The most hopeful quotation from this 4.5 rounded to 5 star book (because when I take two screenshots and share them with my real estate accountability group that’s a big freaking deal) is:

 “The hardest question I have ever been asked is: “How do I stay alive for other people if I have no one?” The answer is that you stay alive for other versions of you. For the people you will meet, yes, sure, but also the people you will be.”

I am looking forward  to meeting all the people you will be in the future.

~Ashley

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