Changing Stance on Comfort Authors

I think I did mention obliquely before that I had changed my stance on comfort authors over the years. And I’m blogging about this now because I’ve run out of other topics about reading. Digression but I’ve always had trouble with one of the 4 topics I blogged under at different times, the recent candidate just happens to be reading. 

So, back when I was a teenager, I had comfort authors that I stuck to cos while I also browse books physically when I visit my local library, I feel like it does take effort to pick up a book and browse the back cover blurb. So lazy, convenience-seeking me just developed a habit of going to the electronic catalogue and browse for specific authors that I had read before and then go and find their books on shelf. Of course, I usually do both anyway when I was visiting my local library back then. 

Fast forward to uni and my first graduate work. I could no longer stick to comfort authors so much because, still convenience seeking, I was borrowing from my uni library (I became a staff at the uni where I did my Bachelor and Honours year) instead of my local library. It had a tiny fiction section in comparison so this was literally browsing the tiny fiction section and selecting which books I haven’t read that piqued my interest. I think the only ones that were on my comfort author list from back years ago were the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell, Raymond E. Feist and Forgotten Realms (mostly R.A Salvatore and Ed Greenwood but some others too). 

To be honest, by then, I had stopped following the Kay Scarpetta series due to her killing off the criminal profiler that was Kay’s would-be boyfriend. I was surprised to learn that actually the death was fake when I picked up the series again cos I was literally running out of books to read at this library with a tiny fiction section. But by the time I picked the series back up, it lost most of its charm for me, not to mention that later on, Marino also changed character etc. For Raymond E. Feist, I read Honoured Enemy and that was okay although not as beloved to me compared to what I call the Sons of Arutha standalones which I bought for my personal collection and the earlier Riftwar and Serpentwar which I put second only to LOTR. Shadows of Conclave etc. is starting to get into mediocre territory for me. Surprisingly, the library has quite a few Forgotten Realms novels which I started reading from high school because the standalone nature of the Harper series was a rarity to me (given my penchant to read epic fantasy and I think that was the dominant subgenre in fantasy back then to the extent that I never even talked about fantasy subgenres but just said I read fantasy; labelling fantasy subgenres that I actually read is a new habit that I was forced to adopt later on in my life and I keep commenting about this on and off). I read both the Cleric Quintet and the first Demonwar from R.A. Salvatore and was impressed about how differently they feel from Drizzt which I personally think of as his worst work even though that is his more well-known work. I mean, I’m personally fond of Drizzt as a character but I never liked Salavatore’s prose nor his plot twist in the Drizzt body of work. 

Then I stopped reading for some years and once I decided to take a more serious stance towards writing, I became less attached to comfort writers. One is that some writers are no longer producing books, I grew tired of following particular authors or series, or in the case of Forgotten Realms, it had been converted to a low magic setting and I just felt bleh about that. The other is this search to broaden my own horizons for the goal of writing fiction. 

Now, if you ask me whether I still have comfort authors, I would say not really or they are no longer authors I literally read back to back when I was younger. They are more authors that I can circle back to once in a while. For example, I would say Guy Gavriel Kay belongs here. Like I said before, no reading back to back for me but I can read him once per year comfortably. I like his prose and I like the way he approaches his stories (well, for the most part. I did like River of Stars better than Under Heaven but that’s just personal preference, not critique on his choice as a writer). I was still following Sue Grafton’s Alphabet series cos I really like Kinsey’s quirkiness but unfortunately she died before she could finish Z and Y ended on a cliffhanger… I read a bit of Robin Hobb and liked the freshness she introduces to fantasy but I don’t know, I somehow have not wanted to read any more of her books after reading the back cover blurbs. Or, I don’t quite want to read them hard enough. I did buy one of her series because I thought I could learn something from it as a writer for a specific type of protagonists. 

And that’s it. Thanks for reading.