Comfort Reading

I must confess. I am a comfort reader. The busier life is, the more I read, not less. Why? Because the books I choose at this time comfort and soothe me. They tell me life is the way I would like it to be rather than how it truly is. My favorite author to read when I am looking for a comfort read is Jane Austen. Her writing style lulls me, makes me feel a little less strongly about everything and colors the sky blue. She stands up for her sex in a way that makes her readers proud to be a woman (lets face it not many men read Jane Austen books). However, when you look at the other authors of her time, the Bronte sisters and Charles Dickens for example, and the historical and political events of the time, it is obvious that she is not giving a complete picture of life in England. In my comfort reading, that's fine with me. I don't want a real picture. I just want beautiful words and courageous characters.

My whole point of this in not to harp on Jane Austen, but more to harp on myself. It is amazing how we can use books to create at world around us that protects us from the realities we most hate or fear. We choose our genre, time era, etc. to fit the world we want to live in, to hedge into when life becomes overwhelming. Of course, the authors have done the same thing, they write about the world they have created. How amazing some of those worlds are! JK Rowling's is so amazing that she has drawn an incredible amount of people into it too. No wonder is was so hard for her to end it, to end the world that she has lived in for so many years.

Even dark literature do not live in reality. They pull out for us what the author most wants his or her readers to see. The pain and deceit, but these authors are not showing the whole picture and color of life either. Poe certainly does not give us a clear picture of reality, nor the other Gothic writers. They write for reaction.

Since we all live in our own realities, is it possible to write the world as it truly is? No. Most definitely not. From our backgrounds we all pull in different aspects, colors, virtues, religious tones. The question is, is there only one reality? Are all the worlds we live in true secluded from the rest or should they be balanced by other worlds? Should my beautiful English country side world be balanced by Virginia Woolf's tints added by the industrial revolution's impact on England as a whole? Should by view of the life of the pioneers painted as a child by Laura Ingalls Wilder be impacted by Willa Cather's shading of societal impacts as the communities evolved? And another question- if it were possible to write life objectively, would anyone read it?