What exactly constitutes a "comfy" book?

>>9694880
Something that doesn't exaggerate the everyday life but takes me through interesting characters interacting in ways which reflect the the world around them in interpretive ways. Just started Vineland and it's super comfy. Siddhartha was super comfy also.

Most people here though will probably tell you it's the prose which makes the book comfy for them. I see Mishima and Woolf getting a lot of props for this. Hell I even see Melville get props for this in Moby Dick even though it's an anything but a 'comfy' book so to say.

>>9694945

A mix of those, in my opinion. That is, a comfy book has a comfy prose and a comfy narrative.

One of the comfiest books I've read is, undoubtedly, Russel's "A History of Western Philosophy".

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>>9694951
Goodreads only gives it 4/5, so I'm gonna have to pass

Vivid, clear, slow-paced prose. Nietzsche's most comfy book is the Genealogy; Schopenhauer, however, is for the most part a comfy philosopher. Spengler (despite his subject) along with Burckhardt are comfy historian\historiographers. Herodotus, Voltaire are comfy historians. Thomas Hardy (except for Jude) and Dickens (except for Expectations, Friend, and Drood) are comfy. Some otherwise difficult writers are comfy if one has the brain to follow them- Sir Isaac Walton, Sir Thomas Browne, Alfred North Whietehead (except for Process)....
The gold standard, the touchstone in English is Boswell's Life and Journals.

>>9694880
Unchallenging intellectually but aesthetically pleasant, along with a slow pace. I've often found "comfy" synonymous with "shallow and narcoleptic," Snow Country for example.

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comfiest lit to me is nonfiction, especially on subjects i am already interested in or versed in. this applies to a lot of film and music criticism.

>>9695157
Oh boy, I had enough trouble with Oliver Twist, it's nice to hear that GE is less comfy. I must read it for college though.

>>9696634
He's definitely in experimental mode in GE. After easy rides like Pickwick, Hard Times and Copperfield it can seem pretty tough-going. Kind of like reading Gatsby and Damned and then taking on Tender is the Night which, though relatively difficult, is after all Fitzgerald's best novel.