Today, I’ve been yearning to get home so I can pick up Georgette Heyer’s A Civil Contract again. Like I said: things feel a bit shaky in my life at the moment; my brain’s calling out for some stability, and for some familiarity, and, most of all, for some old-fashioned decency. Georgette gives me all that and more.

There’s something wonderful in the sure knowledge that a book can change your current perspective on life, and that’s what comfort reading is about for me. Muddy ruts become smooth green meadows in the space of twenty pages!

Some of my favourite comfort books are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Persuasion by Jane Austen, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, and practically anything by Georgette Heyer or L. M. Montgomery. They’re the books I imagine myself into when I’m feeling out of sorts. To me, they’re the literary equivalent of a big, soft pillow.

My copies of these books are invariably soft-covered, with worn corners and creased spines; they’re as comforting to hold as they are to read.

Relatedly, when I’m stressed, or anxious, or generally feeling down, I make a date with myself to go and hang around in a book shop. I don’t necessarily buy anything (though more often than not I walk out with a substantially emptier bank account); this isn’t about retail therapy. It’s about the rows of colourful spines, all nice and neat and orderly; the faint, dense scent of new paper. More than that, though, is the sense of possibility twined in amongst the shelves. All those stories and lands and recipes and theories, just waiting to be poured into someone’s head!

Book shops contain possibilities, but my own book shelves contain more: parallel worlds that I know as well as my own, and that I can slip into and out of in an eye blink.

Generally speaking, books have rules. Stories and literary worlds need to be consistent with their own internal rules, or they fail. In my books, heroines always succeed, love always lasts, and magic might possibly exist if you look in the right corners.

I know that when I open Jane Eyre to a random page somewhere in the middle (I was never a fan of the child-Jane section) I can expect to slip sideways into Jane’s neat, disciplined mind, where things always make sense.

And now, my day’s finally drawing to a close, and it’s time I was away to an arm chair and Georgette Heyer. I might even boil up some cocoa.

Happy reading, OurPatchers!