Coffee and Comfort Reads

This weekend, a tremendously craptastic, downright terrifying thing happen thing to a friend of mine that affected the entire blogging community. I debated writing my own post about and the author who instigiated it and my friend who was harassed and intimidated and stalked, but I didn't for several reasons. One, other blogs and bloggers wrote really excellent write-ups about the facts (here, and here, here, and here) and the feels (here and here) of the case. Two, I'm just tired and heart-sad, to be honest. I'm filled with righteous anger, and I'll be tweeting righteously and angrily for weeks and months to come, but I hit a point on Sunday where I just got tired and needed solace.

So I turned to coffee and comfort reads.



Bloggers start blogging about books because they love books. Authors start writing books because they love books. We interact online and form a community where we discuss books and take pictures of books and cuddle books and cry about books together because we--you guessed it--love books. This online community is a safe haven for so many of us, a cozy microcosm of nerdery where we can talk about things most of the rest of the world doesn't truly get. That sense of safe haven was horribly, dangerously violated. We're all reeling. A person I have talked to nearly every day for a year may have been forced out of my life, and I'm crushed. It felt like this whole mess had taken away the two things I loved best about book blogging--my blogging friends and community, and the love of books.

So yeah--emotions. I was drowning in them. I was barely able to muster the energy to toss a haul post up yesterday, so I knew doing any actual review reading or writing this weekend was never going to happen, but I was starting to lose my sanity a bit, sitting on the couch and walking twitter as the entire world slowly descended into shit. And I remembered what I used to do to make myself feel better when I was younger, and that was rereading.



I reread all the time as a kid and a teen. I re-walked the same fictional paths over and over and hung out with the same fictional friends until they were worn in and cozy and familiar as a childhood blanket. I hardly ever get to reread now that I'm a blogger with a schedule, but this weekend I decided to hell with it. I need a comfort reread, and I need it now. And a heavy duty comfort reread, at that.



My heavy duty comfort rereads are bright, sunny, romantic, zany Sophie Kinsella novels whose plots I have memorized, whose romances make me swoon, and whose quips make me laugh. They are Harry Potter books, with their endless mini stories, jokes, and characters I know by heart. I reread choice sections of Jane Austen novels, or reread the ends of Meg Cabot books, or find all the very best of Tamora Pierce's kiss scenes. I go back and inhabit the happy young Gillian who first read those scenes, and it's seriously the best soul-balm there is.



Wee Gillian was not the coffee addict that Grown Gillian is, but another thing that brings me pleasure is coffee. So I poured myself some coffee (okay, a whole pot of coffee. I AM A GILMORE), cracked open I've Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella, and reread the entire last 100 pages, aka all my favorite romantic bits. And I felt lighter and freer and more like myself, the book-loving girl who started blogging in the first place. Coffee and comfort reads, man. They can end wars.

Coffee = love

Except for Saturday night, when I was brimming with fury and darkness, and Christina and I video chatted and had an evening of rum and kdrama--which also was a huge help, let me tell you. And it highlighted what was basically the ONLY good thing to come out of this utter swampy shitpit of a situation: that this community and the people in it (minus the few EXTREME OUTLIERS) are awesome and kind people. We speak out when bad things happen, and we support each other. Bloggers and authors have rallied and spoken out. Even those of us too crushed to keep speaking, who want to do nothing more than sit on our beds and watch Korean teenagers almost kiss, will do it together. Metaphorically and literally.



I want to have a soothing cup of coffee with you in a rainy coffee shop while we both read books that make us feel better. If you need rum and kdrama, I want to do that with you, too. This weekend brought out the very worst of this community that I have ever seen in my two years on the bookish internet, but it also revealed the very best. This weekend fucking sucked. What happened sucks. You, my lovely bookish nerds, do not suck. There are steps we can take and measures we can enforce and apologies we can hope for, and I will yell and fight on my twitter feed until i'm blue in the face, but here on the blog, i wanted to take a moment to leave the shitstorm of the twitters, have a soothing cup of coffee, and read a comfort book.



So... that was a fun post. Let's pretend we're all sitting in a cozy coffee shop with and infinite number of comfy chairs and couches, Wifi, blankets, and pillows. There's rain outside and a crackling fire inside. What are you drinking? What's your comfort read?

I'm drinking blackblackblack coffee and reading Sophie Kinsella, as I said. Come join me.