where have all the happy books gone?

I love to read and over recent months have been churning through books faster then Speedy Gonzales can say "¡Andale! ¡Andale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba! ¡Yii-hah!". However, I’ve found a lot of this reading to be mostly unpleasant due to the subject matter of my chosen literature. For some reason I seem to be picking up book after book full of doom-and-gloom involving humanitarian crises, abuse and death. I fully appreciate the importance of exposing ourselves to these things in order to remind ourselves that we live in a world where there is great need but books are a form of escapism for me and seriously…five books in a row is too much for one person to handle!

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton came highly recommended by Mom who omitted to tell me that I might need to pop a couple of Prozac when I’m done. The book takes 650 pages to pick up and then ends 5 pages later with the death of a women who lived her entire adult life with a horrible, life destroying secret. There, now you don’t have to go through the same torment as me.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was a short and surprisingly good read considering the author, Jean-Dominique Bauby, wrote the entire book by blinking his left eye while confined in his own body by locked-in syndrome. Not much feel good factor there either.

After gathering many months worth of dust on my bookshelf I finally summoned enough courage to attempt reading Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns detailing life in Afghanistan. Why, why, oh why did I not think to take a back-up book on holiday? Graphic descriptions of unbelievable abuse and hardship don’t feature high on my checklist of what makes a good holiday read.

Okay, enough! I’m helpless. I can’t save the world. I can’t stop people’s pain. I need a happy book! So I scan the shelves at Waterstones and pick out The other Hand by Chris Cleave who claims it holds a secret that can’t be divulged on the back cover. I’m intrigued. So I include it in my 3-for-2 offer and within two days realise that the reason they don’t tell you what it is about is because it’s depro. Argh! And now I can’t tell you what it’s about either or the author will probably hunt me down and make me read ten other books just like it as punishment for giving the big secret away.

Right. I’m left with little choice but to turn to the queen of chick-lit, Marian Keyes. Her latest novel, This Charming Man, starts off in her usual light-hearted tone and I start to relish each page of girly antics. However, this is not the book to break the cycle. For within its pages are excerpts containing insights into the horrors of domestic abuse. While hugely relevant I think I’m going to give my heart a rest after this one. I can only take so much before I’m likely to crack and I’ll have to be rushed off to Charing Cross A&E on account of tear induced dehydration.

It’s now a case of self preservation. Perhaps I’ll pick up a few copies of The London Paper and find out what’s happening with Lily, Kate and Amy. And for half an hour in my day I might be able to pretend I’m naive to what is going on all around me. But then again, maybe that’s not what I really want to do at all.