Your Next Stop: Leaving ‘The Comfort Zone’?

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Terry Pratchett (photo by Rob Wilkins/Doubleday)

Many avid readers occasionally stray out of their literary comfort zone. I’m one of them. 🙂

Doing that can be interesting, educational, mind-expanding, challenging, rut-avoiding, tolerance-enhancing, and…fun.

The majority of novels I’ve gotten to in recent years are 21st- or 20th-century works of general fiction by authors from the United States or England. (I used to focus a lot on 19th-century literature from those two countries, but after a while one reads most of what one wants to read from that era and the authors are, um, not around anymore to produce new books.)

Also in recent years, I’ve enjoyed quite a few 21st- and 20th-century Canadian novels (Margaret Atwood, L.M. Montgomery, etc.); 20th- and 19th-century French novels (Camus, Colette, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Zola, etc.); and 19th-century Russian novels (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, etc.). So, not really far out of any comfort zone.

A little less often on my list have been novels by authors from Australia (Liane Moriarty and Colleen McCullough!), Brazil (Jorge Amado and Paulo Coelho!), Chile (Isabel Allende!), Colombia (Gabriel Garcia Marquez!), the Czech Republic (Jaroslav Hasek!), Germany (Erich Maria Remarque and Hermann Hesse!), India (Arundhati Roy!), Italy (Elsa Morante and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa!), Japan (Haruki Murakami!), New Zealand (Janet Frame!), Nigeria (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Wole Soyinka!), Scotland (Sir Walter Scott!), South Africa (Nadine Gordimer and Alan Paton!), Sweden (Stieg Larsson and Fredrik Backman!), and Switzerland (Johanna Spyri!), among other places. An incomplete list by me, and some of those authors ended up moving to other countries.

But getting out of one’s comfort zone is not just a geographical thing. For instance, I just read Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novel Small Gods despite — with a few exceptions such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — my not being much of a fantasy buff. The weird, satiric, religion-questioning, often-dark, often-funny Small Gods — part of Pratchett’s Discworld series — was quite good, actually, after a slow-ish start.

Also somewhat off the beaten track for me have been long-long-ago novels (such as Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century Don Quixote and Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century The Tale of Genji), experimental/modernist fiction (as in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway), novels in poetic form or with a good chunk of verse (Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire), very lengthy novels (James Clavell’s Shogun, Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour, a number of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books), sci-fi (the great Octavia E. Butler, anyone?), young-adult literature (I must revisit the aforementioned L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables in the not-too-distant future), mysteries, etc.

What do you read to vary your fiction focus?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — with more on a developer’s bait-and-switch project — is here.

111 thoughts on “Your Next Stop: Leaving ‘The Comfort Zone’?”

  2. My all-time out-there author is Jasper Fforde and his Thursday Next series. The reader knows what’s going on but doesn’t at the same time. Truly different, clever satire, an altogether satisfying series which takes books into another dimension of fiction 🙂 G.

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  3. “Shogun” is great!
    I like epic type stories like that.
    Sagas through time I like, too. I loved “The Good Earth”.
    Paranormal and ghost type stories would be out of my comfort zone.
    I just bought “A Ghost and His Gold” by Roberta Cheadle.
    I’m thinking not just ghosts, but I’ll learn something about S. Africa.
    I’ve got a lot to do that is not reading, but it is my next book.
    LOL… I’ve put it in front of Mad River Road” by Joy! (bought it years ago, started to read it, got called to do a film, got on a roll, forgot about it and just found it behind other Joy books. Pays to clean up the bookcases once in awhile!

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    • Thank you, Resa! I agree — “Shogun” is a fantastic novel; one of those 1,000-page books that seems too short.

      Glad you have another Joy Fielding novel on the horizon. Another Canadian author I like very much. 🙂 You are inspiring me to clean up my bookcases, too!

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  4. My reading ‘comfort zone’ is probably outsiderish literature. Of course, any one with a publishing contract and a run of many thousands of copies can only be so ‘outside’,but given that proviso, that’s where a goodly portion of my reading life has been spent, or misspent, very possibly. And ‘hard-boiled’ crime stuff…

    Outside that zone? Novelists in English, especially British ones, before 1920, Melville’s whale book excepted. I was in my 60’s before I read either “Jane Eyre” or “Wuthering Heights”. Only two months ago, I read “The Woman in White”.

    I have yet to steel myself for the pleasures of Jane Austen, though I don’t doubt they reside within her books. And Dickens– my mother read us “Oliver Twist” and “David Copperfield”, high school forced “Great Expectations” on me, and in college I experienced “Hard Times”. But on my own dime, I have avoided him, well, like the dickens. Trollope? Nope, not a word of him. A whack I’d be, to claim I’ve read a Thackeray.

    I’m better with Russians, but I have yet to face up to the major challenges in novel form put forth by Dostoyevsky, though I do own what I intend, one day soon, to have put behind me. “Anna Karenina” awaits, though I am veteran of “War and Peace”.

    Which leads me to conclude something about my many piles and shelves of books: a great many of them endure because they go unread, and have gone unread, in some cases for decades. They are a sort of accretion of my good intentions– unrealized mostly because some bright bauble of a book on the street catches my roving eye, and charmed, I read it instead..

    So many books, so little et cetera.

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    • Thank you, jhNY! A great, enjoyable self-description of your comfort zone and non-comfort zone reading/intended reading.

      “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights,” and “The Woman in White” are fascinating reads at any age. And your method of acquiring books certainly makes for all kinds of unexpected choices.

      Hope you enjoy Jane Austen if you get to her. The relatively short “Persuasion” — my favorite Austen novel — can be a good place to start.

      I liked but didn’t love Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” (clever rhyme you came up with 🙂 ) and can say the same for the two Trollope novels I tried.

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  6. Hi Dave, I’m not sure if I have favourite genres. I read across the full spectrum from historical, to war, to family drama. I would say I’m not a huge Sci-fi fan but I’ve read and enjoyed HG Wells and John Wyndham among others. I read dystopia, and horror and poetry. I don’t read a lot of romance but I do read it sometimes. I recently read Carmilla which had themes of lesbianism which was unheard of / not spoken about in Victorian times.

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  7. “Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” definitely out of my comfort zone. Other Swedish writer Fredrik Backman is not. “A Man Called Ove” a fav and “Anxious People” definitely worth a read.

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    • Thank you, Michele! I loved “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and its two sequels. Quite violent at times, as you know, but total page-turners. And I agree about “A Man Called Ove” — a wonderful novel.

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  10. Dave, your reading list is impressively varied. I agree that we benefit from variety. I can’t stick to a single genre whether I’m reading or writing, or even watching TV. Although I can’t read much before my eyes wear out these days. (I can’t seem to get glasses that let me see properly…) That said, when I had Netflix I was enjoying a number of their series from other countries, which were dubbed into English.
    Have a splendid new week. Hugs.

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    • Thank you, Teagan! Nice that you enjoy variety when reading, writing, or watching something! A really good approach to life. 🙂

      Sorry about the eyes issue. I hope you can find glasses that work.

      Have a great week, too!

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  11. I read a lot of non-fiction, but I’ve been reading more fiction lately, as I’ve “met” writers through blogging. I never thought I would read fantasy, but like Rebecca, I thoroughly enjoyed Teagan Ríordáin Geneviene’s ‘Dead of Winter’ series. I would have also drawn a line between paranormal and supernatural, yet I’ve enjoyed books with supernatural elements by Mae Clair and Staci Troilo ‘The Haunting of Chatham Hollow’ and again by Teagan Geneviene, ‘A Peril in Ectoplasm.’ I think I have grown to appreciate well written books in a much wider variety of genres. I’ve also gone back to read books that I read a long time ago but were eclipsed by their movies. Earlier this year, I reread ‘The Andromeda Strain’ by Michael Crichton and I enjoyed it very much.

    Great topic, Dave and, as usual, I enjoyed the discussion in the comments.

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  12. I very much enjoyed your literature trips around the world and the advantages it gives us to read about far away cultures, people or times, Dave:) I have just started reading “The Sealswoman’s Gift”a 17th century romance by Sally Magnusson. The story takes us from the mud of Iceland to a harem in Algiers. or from selling people to slavery. There seems also to be a connection to nowadays refugee crisis. Many thanks !

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  15. Hi Dave! Before I answer your question, I just wanted to say that I love Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series and the spinoffs he wrote based on it, and the later books, like Night Watch, are much better than the earlier ones. As for a book that took me out of my comfort zone, the one I’d recommend is Jesmyn Ward’s SALVAGE THE BONES, about a working-class African-American family in rural Mississippi before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. Powerful and beautifully written.

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    • Thank you, Kim! Glad you’re an avid fan of the Discworld series! I’ve only read two of its many installments, and so far I would say I like the series but don’t love it. But a small sample size…

      And I appreciate your mention and description of “Salvage the Bones”! It sounds depressingly tremendous.

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  16. What has taken me out of my reading comfort zone over the past few years is writing a review of every book I read. It requires that I interact with a text in ways that I hadn’t since college and grad school. I’ve also branched out into reading some genre fiction.

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  17. Wow, Dave, that’s quite an impressive list of foreign authors! I don’t intentionally vary my fiction focus. If a book you mention, such as “A Time to Love and a Time to Die,” or an award-winning book catches my attention, I may find myself in strange and disquieting worlds, well beyond my comfort zone. Such was the case with the 2014 awarding-winning novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings” by Marlon James, a Jamaican-born novelist. Brutal was the violence surrounding the killings in Jamaica beginning in 1976, including the attempt on the life of the reggae singer Bob Marley (1945-1981); foul was the language. Yet I could not look away.

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    • Thank you, Rosaliene! Yes, leaving one’s reading comfort zone doesn’t have to be meticulously plotted out; it can kind of happen.

      “A Brief History of Seven Killings” does sound VERY intense; I know what you mean about some novels being incredibly disturbing but hard to turn away from. Cormac McCarthy’s hugely violent “Blood Meridian” was one example of that for me. “Strange and disquieting worlds” — a very evocative phrase by you!

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  18. Vary my “fiction focus”? Wow, I barely even have one! For decades I have been a compulsive collector of non-fiction authors/titles, with seemingly zero fiction items on my bookshelf.
    Therefore my big variation lately was to give the non-fiction a rest and switch to “literary” fiction of the type most normal people like to review and discuss in blogs like this.
    (1) My overall top literary favorite quickly became William Boyd: Any Human Heart, Brazzaville, Blue Afternoon, Waiting for Sunrise. Then I went after Kingsolver, whom I had never yet read: Poisonwood Bible, Lacuna, Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, etc. Then some old American classics, like Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac that I’d never got around to reading before age 60. (Still have never read Lord of the Rings.) (2) Here’s a switch: Try Sinclair Lewis: “It Can’t Happen Here,” the 1935 prophecy of an American Govt gone awry. Such a far-fetched scenario.
    (3) I do have “genre” fiction/paperback series like Grisham, Crichton, LeGuin, Dan Brown, Nelson DeMille, Sue Grafton, Eliz. George, Tony Hillerman, et al. – my escape hatch lit. So therefore another variation is to switch to the memoirs and other non-fiction works of those favorite authors: Boyd’s hefty “Bamboo” memoir for example; Ursula K LeGuin or Stephen King on Writing; anthologies such as Elizabeth George’s “Moments on the Edge, 100 Years of Crime Stories by Women;” Tony Hillerman “Seldom Disappointed;” Kingsolver’s family farm experiment: “Animal Vegetable Mineral;” Peter Coyote, “Sleeping Where I Fall.” Or any and all biographies, memoirs, recipes and writing instructions for that matter.
    (4) Switch to humor: load up on David Sedaris (Is that fiction or not?) If you don’t like Terry Pratchett, try Terry Bisson (sci-fi humor); or the late Sue Townsend, who wrote the Adrian Mole teen diary series, and “The Queen and I,” about Royals reduced to living in public housing. Lately I am again chuckling over the droll stories and illustrations of James Thurber, one of my earliest literary heroes. — Hope some of these suggestions are of use to you all.

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    • Thank you, kaylebrooks! Moving from mostly nonfiction to fiction is definitely a great way to change up one’s reading — and you’ve read a LOT of great fiction since that move. What a comprehensive comment; I’m sure various people will appreciate your suggestions. 🙂

      I’m also a big fan of Barbara Kingsolver and Sinclair Lewis, among other writers you mentioned — whether “general” or genre novelists (John Grisham almost never disappoints and is certainly quite “readable). “It Can’t Happen Here” is amazingly prescient, and Lewis’ earlier, 1920s run of novels — “Main Street,” “Babbitt,” “Arrowsmith,” “Elmer Gantry,” “Dodsworth” — is spectacular.

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  19. Something that kicks me out of my reading comfort zone is joining a Reading Round on Goodreads, especially a General round. You are assigned 4 books to be read in 3 months. They can be any genre, or not even fiction. DNF is not an option, and you have to write a review for each one. The payoff, of course, is 4 reviews for one of my books from others in the group. It’s a way to drum up reviews, but also to discover other authors and types of writing.

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  20. Dave – I agree wholeheartedly that reading books that are outside our comfort zone is crucial for personal growth and development. By exposing myself to different perspectives and ideas, I want to expand my knowledge and understanding of the world. In doing so, my hope is to become more open-minded and empathetic – to be able to critically evaluate my personal perspectives and consider alternative viewpoints.

    Generally, the books that have taken me out of my comfort zone have been non-fiction, but this year, I decided that I would take a detour into fiction. I chose books that I would never have consider reading. What a wonderful adventure I have had and look forward to more of the same as I enter a new year of reading in 2024.

    “The Case of the Reincarnated Client” by Targuin Hall. A client claiming she was murdered in a past life is a novel dilemma for Vish Puri, India’s most private investigator.

    “Dead of Winter” series by Teagan Ríordáin Geneviene
    “The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza” by Lawrence Block
    “The Woman in Red” by Dana Giovinazzo (the wife of Garibaldi)
    “Blackman’s Coffin” by Mark de Castrique
    “The Betrayals” by Bridge Collins
    “Metropolitan Stories by Christine Coulson.

    Every one of these novels opened up new perspectives (For example, I did not know the ramifications to the population when India devalued their rupee in 1991)

    Today, I have taken a short brake into non-fiction again to read “Art is Life – Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night” by Jerry Saltz

    Thank you for a wonderful post! I will be back for the follow-up conversation.

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    • Thank you, Michael! Every one of us has some popular authors we’re not thrilled with. I can’t say I’m a big fan of Terry Pratchett’s work (“Small Gods” is the second novel of his I’ve read) but his humor, satire, social commentary, and weirdness does have some appeal to me. 🙂

      I appreciate you mentioning examples you like of your un-rut reading!

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