6 Book Recommendations For Rainy Days

I consistently get asked by you lovely Patreon types, and in normal life what my favourite book is, and I find it impossible to answer that question. 

I think it's because books are in my head, a sort of form of transport. 

When someone asks what my favourite book is, it feels like I'm trying to answer the question, 'how do you like to travel from one place to another?', because the answer to that will always depend on where you want to go, what kind of day it is, how fit and strong or tired and sooky you're feeling, what you did yesterday. 

For example, I love walking, but if i'm tired, and it's dark and cold, I would much prefer a car. Unless I'm walking with someone who is so interesting that they make the dark and cold irrelevant, or it's snowing. If it's snowing, it depends on whether I have gloves, and what shoes I'm wearing. 

That said, here are a few books that I recommend to you for rainy days (both literal and emotional), despite not knowing what shoes you're wearing. 

These are all books that I like despite (perhaps because) they aren't fancy books. These aren't the books you carry on the bus if you want to show off how bookish you are. 

They're delightful, engaging, beautiful, delicious and well written. They're not overtly fraught or existential, though if you said they weren't deep you'd be underestimating how good they are. They're probably what many people would call 'guilty pleasures', but only if you're the kind of person who feels guilty about pleasure. 

I'll keep it to 6, because otherwise I'll be here all day, and many of them will be for Authors, rather than individual books and I'm going to leave out Fantasy and Sci Fi, because they are, while very good for rainy days, also worth whole individual posts at some point. So this isn't an exhaustive list, or even a best-of-all-time list, or a comprehensive list, but it's a list, so there:

MYSTERY

Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey Novels, particularly Busman's Honeymoon, but only if you've read the other ones first. She has a light touch that manages to integrate tight technical and structural plotting with humour, with grimness and with deft observations of beauty. 

HISTORY

Georgette Heyer. Basically all of her books, from the more serious to the sillier, but with a particular fondness for Venetia, in which, (like Lord Peter Wimsey), romance is pursued via the medium of quoting poems at each other. Mum used to cover her Heyer books with the wrappers off easter-egg chocolates, both because they were like treats, and because the covers tend towards being a bit vomitously bodice ripper. An injustice to the delicate writing. Her best work is basically a cross between P.G. Wodehouse and Jane Austen, with an added philip of having done a huge amount of historical research to back up her backdrops. 

ALLEGEDLY CHILDREN'S BOOKS THAT ARE ALSO GREAT FOR GROWNUPS TO READ

James Thurber The Thirteen Clocks. The edition I had as a youth was a pair of books, the second one being called The Wonderful O, but modern editions tend to come as just the one. Read it out loud if you can.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, which is so much fun, and somehow reminds me of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and The Sea of Stories.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle. Does this count as sci fi?

Anything by Rosemary Sutcliffe, but particularly The Eagle of The Ninth, which gave me a love of roman history, and historical novels in general.