Link: http://www.griffith.edu.au/griffithreview/campaign/apo/apo_ed16/Pearson_ed16.pdf

Whenever I feel as if I am falling into a depression, one of the things that I feel helps to bring me out of it (beyond, of course, the great care of my friends, family, and colleagues; good food; exercise; and most importantly, sunshine) is to read really, really depressing early 20th century European literature and also post-WWII era stuff(excluding Sartre, which I find is more depressing, but I haven't yet figured out exactly why). My usual roster of comfort reading includes items such as Camus' The Plague, the essays of Natalia Ginzburg, Orwell but especially Homage to Catalonia, and other books of that ilk. (Do those make up an 'ilk' to anyone else? They do to me, but I don't know what I'd call it. There must be a name. Maybe 'Against Nazis and Totalitarians?)

Other kinds of literature can help to stave off a depression with magical realism, parallel universes, sex, celebrity, sharp humor, or whatever, but there is something about the bleakness of war and struggles with morality, responsibility, and death (always death) that somehow manages to ultimately break me out of a funk in a different way than say, a bag of Dove dark chocolate eggs, could possibly hope to. Why is this?

Is it because there's nothing so easy, in some ways, as being against the Nazi's?

Follow up:

I suspect it has to do with the fact that these are the books I most strongly associate with perhaps my most recent and the sharpest memories of the pleasure of reading.

It's a little depressing. It's not that I don't have other happy or earlier reading memories. I distinctly remember devouring armfuls of books about sharks in the second grade. There was a whole series at our library about sharks, with each book devoted to a different kind of shark.

When I was old enough to babysit and it seemed that those EyeWitness books for kids were everywhere, I remember thinking it was such a shame that kids would spend so much time just looking so much, just looking at the sharks, when they could be READING about them.

I also remember practically memorizing these books with much pleasure as a kid: Anne of Green Gables (the first one only); the Little Princess, and Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills. (It was because I went on a long, really boring vacation once and those were the only three books I had with me for three months.)

And reading that early war stuff during high school encompassed a series of intellectual 'aha' moments when I just felt like something I had read changed the way I thought.

But since graduating, I will admit that I've read very, very little. My new library card is helping things out a bit. I feel out of practice, in many ways, like engaging with a book now is about as arduous as trying to relearn how to play the piano after so many years of disuse. I can hear in my head what I'm going for, but I just don't have the chops to do it anymore. And, I'm lazy.

But! I've decided to retrain myself, and to try to find a new place for literature in my life. And I don't feel a need to go all the way back to the shark books, or to Anne of Green Gables.

I'm still reading Orwell. I just finished the most heartbreaking but also good novella by Elena Poniatowska, Dear Diego, and will now start it in Spanish. I haven't yet decided if I really like it or not. And next on my list is a set of personal journals by Camus, which I glanced through briefly and already love for its ordinariness.

What do other people read for comfort here, and do we want to resurrect our not very good attempt at a book club? Maybe something we've probably all either read and forgotten or wanted to read and haven't yet gotten around to?