Comfort Food

After learning about the horrific attack at the Boston Marathon on Monday I yearned for distraction. I don't watch the news much, preferring to get my news from the Internet, and I really have no interest in watching the same short video clips on an endless loop while pundit after pundit engages in blatant rumor-mongering (some might even say fear-mongering). So perhaps it is not that surprising that I wanted to take my mind off tragedy.

First, I turned to baseball because it's normally a really good distraction. But it was hard to get into the game because the Phillies' offense was anemic.

Eventually I realized that what I really needed was to lose myself in a book. Yes, I needed some literary comfort food. It shouldn't have been hard to find said literary comfort food, but it was. I may have made things needlessly difficult for myself by deciding that I couldn't choose a book where the messed-up world was a major part of the story (thus knocking nearly all the YA books I own out of contention). I decided on Jennifer Weiner's In Her Shoes (the first of Weiner's books I ever read) because I'd been thinking about re-reading it ever since I watched the movie (several times) on cable. But I realized that I didn't really want to start reading a novel; I wanted to read a piece of a novel.

I settled on the penultimate chapter of Jane Austen's Persuasion. Persuasion is my second-favorite Austen novel and the 2007 BBC version with Sally Hawkins and Rupert Penry-Jones has accompanied me to sleep for the past couple of weeks. I chose the penultimate chapter because it contains Captain Wentworth's letter, which I adore. (Much as I love the aforementioned BBC adaptation, I think they messed up the scene with Captain Wentworth's letter.)

In the end, my distraction worked. I was able to go to bed thinking of swoon-worthy Captain Wentworth instead of tragedy. And isn't that one of the greatest gifts we get from stories?