I want to talk about what it means to read 'for comfort.' This phrase is often used pejoratively — implying that comfort reading is easier or less valuable than reading for improvement or challenge. I think this framing is wrong.

What comfort reading actually requires is the same as all reading: you have to care about what's happening. The difference is that comfort reading doesn't ask you to encounter difficulty — cognitive difficulty, emotional difficulty, ethical difficulty. It asks you to inhabit a world that's organized around pleasure and security.

There are periods when this is exactly what a person needs. The ability of a book to provide safety and pleasure is a genuine function, not a lesser function. The Blandings Castle novels by Wodehouse. The Miss Read novels. A.A. Milne. These books are not less than the difficult ones. They're doing something different that is also worth doing.