Top Ten Tuesday: Comfort Reads

Top Ten Tuesday is a fun weekly meme, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Everyone is welcome to join in the fun.

It is a short list, not a full ten, this week, as there haven’t been many specific comfort reads in my life. I tend to just read more when stressed (like I have the past few months!)

---

TWILIGHT, by Stephanie Meyer

I was a teen right when the TWILIGHT series was being adapted movies, putting it very much into the common consciousness, at least for my age group. While I was never a fan of the series, I did use the first book as a way to calm down after nightmares because I found the premise so ridiculous that there wasn’t any tension in it for me when reading.

Despite the plot seeming ridiculous, the writing was not too bad, which meant it was easy to read, rather than getting yanked out of the flow and thus ruining the point of reading it.

The Original Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn

The Original Thrawn Trilogy (HEIR TO THE EMPIRE, DARK FORCE RISING, and THE LAST COMMAND) was another set of books I read to deal with nightmares around the same time. These are Star Wars spin offs, apparently one of the most popular books due to the brilliant central villain Thrawn (who has since obtained even more books.)

This series manages to capture the fun and feeling of the original movie trilogy. It’s a sweeping epic and I’d love to try and track down copies to read it again.

The Fire and Thorn Trilogy, by Rae Carson

This trilogy (FIRE AND THORNS, THE CROWN OF EMBERS, and THE BITTER KINGDOM) is probably my favourite series. I’ve lost track how many times I’ve read it (the plastic fused to the covers has peeled off from so much handling!) I took it on a very wet Spanish exchange where I couldn’t go anywhere but stay in and watch dubbed TV, and read the trilogy back to back again and again.

This series (of which the second is my favourite) contains politics, personal faith but also people twisting it, a forgotten/hidden past, and magic.

WINTER’S ORBIT, by Everina Maxwell

A far more recent entry to this list than the other inclusions, I think I’ve read WINTER’S ORBIT three times in the sixteen months or so since its release. The last time was when I was very sick and trying to distract myself from that while waiting for appointments, hence the book gets a place on this list.

This book is just so warm and fuzzy, a sci-fi romance with politics in the background of a sweet romance between two partners who aren’t great at communicating (or realising how much the other one likes them.) And we have a sequel coming later this year!

Middle Grade

This is a category more than a book, but I do gravitate more to MG at the moment when stressed. In fact, I write this in a period of a fair bit of stress, having just pushed aside an adult book I wanted to read for two different UKMG series (BRIGHTSTORM and WONDERSCAPE) as I’m feeling much more in the mood for that.

---

What are your comfort reads?