From Blyton to Bryson: comfort reading to enjoy during lockdown
Although many superb new books are still being published we also sometimes need a dose of the familiar. So here are some recommendations for comfort reading: works that are familiar, gentle and set in a kinder or funnier world than the one that currently presents itself.
I find myself yearning for the gentle, rain-soaked watercolour writing of Maeve Binchy, with her adorable girls brimming with life and worried, caring mothers. Circle of Friends is a good place to start, tracing the lives of three Irish girls from the 1950s on, but every book she wrote is full of sweetness and heart.
If you haven’t picked up a James Herriot in a while, you may have forgotten just how good he is. As well as being funny, kind and surprisingly romantic, his books such as All Creatures Great and Smalloffer a beautiful sense of wide open spaces – ideal for when you are feeling hemmed in. He also writes conveniently short, easy chapters, with plenty of dogs.
The BBC has brought forward its new adaptation of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series as succour to a grateful nation. Some moments in the books can seem a bit much these days – particularly the hammering poor Gwendoline gets for daring to be overweight and feeling sad about saying goodbye to her parents – but the novels remain classics. For more boarding school tales try Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did at School and Antonia White’sFrost in May.
Garrison Keillor, whose Prairie Home companion radio show is also available as a podcast, was accused of being twee in his novel Lake Wobegon Days, but these tales of small-town life in the midwest are as warm and reassuring as a big pie. And if you like avuncular Americans, don’t forget Bill Bryson, whose tourist books now read like ancient history. Try Tim Moore, too: Another Fine Mess, in which he travels across Trumpland in a 93-yearold Ford Model T, sounds gimmicky, but is in fact funny, touching and transformative. Continuing the escape theme, both Andrew Martin and Monisha Rajesh are brilliant on very long train journeys.
Fans of Sherlock Holmes might also enjoy Kate Summerscale, who writes intricate nonfiction about the Victorian era. The Suspicions of Mr Whicherwas a breakout hit, and her latest, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, is equally beguiling, a world in which mysteries are explained and secrets satisfyingly revealed.
When it comes to the classics, I have never understood the fuss around whether George Eliot’s Middlemarch is difficult: it is gossipy, sad, romantic and exciting. Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica is difficult; Middlemarch is charming, and if not now, when?
You’re in for an absolute treat if you haven’t read it.
And finally don’t forget the staples of the comfort reading genre: Patrick O’Brian, Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, Louisa May Alcott, Helen Fielding and PG Wodehouse. They will not let you down. As for me, I’m going back to the brilliance of Douglas Adams: “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun … ”
• The Bookshop on the Shoreby Jenny Colgan is published by Sphere..