My all-time comfort reading list
weather + book + blanket = bliss
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The comments on this were great. There’s a PDF of all the titles that were mentioned in them at the bottom of this post.
Just to be clear before we get started: these aren’t my favourite novels in the whole world (although actually some of them are). They’re not edgy or challenging or experimental. I’m talking very specifically about books that make you feel exactly like this:
NOT like this but with a huge cat’s face looking in through the kitchen window at the yummy mice, and not like this but with a corpse in the sitting room or something baroque going on in the sleeping quarters. Those are whole other lists.
In the same way that Jill Barklem’s illustrations are saved from winsomeness (in my view) by being so rich in detail and so exquisitely well-observed, the below comfort reads take you into really deeply satisfying, fully realised worlds where you feel safe and cosy.
It’s not so much that nothing unpleasant happens in them, because it does sometimes, but rather that the feeling they evoke is one of deep contentment. These are books that start feeling like old friends halfway through Chapter One.
The books are listed randomly, in the order in which I thought of them. Also: it’s taken me ages to compile this list and it would take me even longer to write a mini-review under each title. I’ve done it when it felt natural, but where the sentiment the book evokes is a great upsurge of love and joy but no actual recollection of the plot 👵🏼, I’ve quoted from the publisher’s blurb to give you the gist.
I KNOW you’ll have loads of favourite comfort reads of your own, and also that I’ll have missed some - I’m hugely looking forward to the comments. [Edited to add: the comments are fantastic and full of new-to-me suggestions].
The links are to my bookshop.org page wherever possible.
I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith. Arguably the greatest comfort read of all time, with one of the great opening paragraphs: “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it. The rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy.”
This is a coming of age novel; our narrator is 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, who lives in bohemian penury in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere with her eccentric stepmother Topaz, her beautiful sister Rose, her little brother and her author father, who has writer’s block and is permanently furious. Then some rich Americans turn up. I read this every year when the weather turns cold. I couldn't love it more.
The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford. ‘There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer,’ Graham Greene wrote in A Sort of Life, his first volume of autobiography. Nancy Mitford had more of a berg. She chipped off bits of it and threw them into her narratives, meaning that the utter bewitching charm and romance of them is never cloying, because it is always tempered with a little bracing chill. She was a genius.
(Nancy Mitford’s estate asked me to have a go at ‘updating’ The Pursuit of Love for a contemporary readership - not something that would have occurred to me, since the novel is perfection - and the result is called Darling. I’m very proud of it. I’m resisting posting the cover, but actually sod it, why not? Here it is!).
Romantic Comedy and Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld. Speaking of retellings: Eligible is a brilliant take on Pride and Prejudice. Romantic Comedy is about why famous men technically don’t hook up with smart, funny women, even though it happens so often the other way round. Both are perfect CRs.
Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido. I used to be obsessed with this book when I was very young. Eighteen-year-old Katherine - bright, stylish, frustratedly suburban - doesn't know how her life will change when the brilliant Jacob Goldman first offers her a place at university. When she enters the Goldmans' rambling bohemian home, presided over by the beatific matriarch Jane, she realises that Jacob and his family are everything she has been waiting for.
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe, who could easily feature more than once on this list. This isn’t a novel - it’s a memoir that takes the form of her letters home. In 1982, 20-year-old Nina moves to London to be the nanny to the children of Mary-Kay Wilmers, who was the editor of the London Review of Books. Nina has no idea about nannying, or London, or children particularly, and also it’s the sort of household where Alan Bennett comes to tea. Unforgettably great, also hilarious.