Recently, a reader said to me that she wanted to read something happy. She had just read a heavy book and wanted something lighter. I completely understand the impulse. Sometimes I need to read Terry Pratchett as a palette cleanser. But when she asked me for something happy, I blanked. I looked over all of the books that were currently on the shelves in my library’s browsing collection*, and all I could see were sad books, frightening books, and angry books. They’re all good reads…they’re just not light fare.
I’ve read a lot of the books in that collection and I really liked a lot of them. After the reader asked her question, I started to question why I read so many sad, frightening, and angry books. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me. I’ve always gravitated away from books with guaranteed happy endings for some reason. Perhaps it’s because happy endings, to me, so rarely seem deserved in fiction. Maybe it’s that I’m a pessimist and find unhappy books more believable.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that it’s more than just that I find unhappy endings more plausible. I think it’s really because I feel content most of the time—content shading into happy. I hope I will never have to feel the emotions that characters feel, but I’m curious what it might be like to experience emotions on the other side of the spectrum. If a book is well written, I can feel a bit of the terror of a woman on the run from killers, like I did in Riley Sager’s Final Girls, or taste a bit of the tragedy and pride in an act of sacrifice, like at the end of Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.
Happy books just don’t compare to the range of the sad, frightening, and angry books. The closest I can get are funny books. The problem there is that I have a really weird sense of humor…but that’s another post.
* I work at an academic library, so most of our books are for academic use and not for fun reading.