Comfort Food Reading

I have lots of stuff in my TBR pile.  Though to be accurate, I guess it's not really a "pile," since 95% of the book-buying I do these days is on my Kindle.  (I'll go into the whole e-book vs. physical book debate some other time, but suffice it to say for now that the Kindle was a space-saving purchase for me - ours is a house full of bookshelves and there are still random books in stacks almost everywhere you look.)  In any case, the virtual stack is growing pretty high - there's a Lynsay Sands Argeneau vampire novel I just picked up for $2 that I hadn't gotten around to reading, a couple other romances that came recommended through reliable sources on Twitter.  I have a copy of Chris Holm's Dead Harvest winging its way to me soon via a random Twitter giveaway (who says the internet's not good for anything?), there's the new Lady Julia Grey Christmas novella that I preordered back in September... so why aren't I reading any of those right now?  Why am I re-reading instead?

I blame Deanna Raybourn, and the aforementioned novella.  When it downloaded automatically to my Kindle at the top of November (and I love that, by the way, I'd pre-ordered it so long ago I had forgotten about it!), I realized it had been a while since I'd read the last book of this richly detailed series.  So instead of diving face-first into the Christmas story like a kid into a birthday cake, I went back to the beginning and started re-reading Silent in the Grave.

If you've never read this series, do yourself a favor and start.  I describe it to people as Victorian-mystery-kinda-romance-just-a-touch-of-paranormal, with clever, witty writing and characters you come to love as old friends, down to the most minor supporting characters (I would love to buy Morag a drink sometime).  One of my proudest moments was getting my book club (whose members tend to recommend "important" depressing books about the Holocaust) hooked on this series.  I discovered this series right around the time my mother's sudden death in 2010, and Julia and Brisbane's frustrating but irresistible relationship (not to mention the entire March family) was a welcome escape during those first horrible weeks.  So I'll always be grateful to them (and to Raybourn) for that.

I know some people who read a book once and never want to pick it up again.  I don't understand that.  Re-reading favorite books is comfort food for me.  It's a giant bowl of mac and cheese on a cold afternoon. (Even more so these days, since dietary restrictions make the aforesaid mac and cheese verboten.)  A favorite series is even better - a whole string of books to wallow in.  For a while I was re-reading Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunter series around Halloween (the first few books at least still remain sentimental favorites).

So yeah, I'm definitely a re-reader.  Which is probably why my TBR pile keeps growing.  Oops.  I'll get right on that.  As soon as I finish Dark Road to Darjeeling.  And The Dark Enquiry.