Last night, just before going to sleep, I finished Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate for, I don't know, the 20th time? The 30th time? I don't know it quite as well as The Pursuit of Love, adored by everyone in my family and pressed upon me at a tender age. That, I can quote reams from, and quite often do. "Les origines de la famille Radlett sont perdues dans les brumes d'antiquité"; the Kroesigs' garden was "a riot of sterility"; uncle Matthew's opinion that "abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends". Et cetera and so forth.
These books I come back to time and again when I am feeling stressed, tired, or miserable – or even when I don't have that excuse. It may be that I need a little rest, or a palate cleanser, between more serious reading projects – a prize shortlist I am ploughing through for work purposes, for instance, or a nice, fat 19th-century novel. I suspect the reason I am drawn over and again to these comforting books is that sometimes I need very badly to escape into another world – one where, unlike that which we call the "real" world, there are certainties. For, while even well-read books offer new discoveries, there are generally no heartstopping shocks to catch you out in a work you have read every year since adolescence.
What else is on my crisis-reading list, the books I read time and again, year after year? Without a doubt, every single one of the Richard Hannay books of John Buchan, which I love with a slightly mad passion. And Jane Austen, with the exception of Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, which I love, but not in that way. My favourite line from Persuasion at the moment is "the Musgroves, like their house, were in a state of alteration, perhaps improvement", which makes me laugh out loud every time.
While I would go to the firing line defending the brilliance of all these books, no one could claim that reading them over and over again is a particularly edifying experience; much more improving would be for me to start filling the hideous lacunae in, say, my knowledge of late 20th-century American literature. (I am embarrassed to note that all the books I mention, the Austens and the Mitfords and the Buchans, are essentially about socially conservative, desperately posh, mostly English and Scottish people, so in times of crisis I am clearly not searching for radical changes to the accepted order.) On the other hand, I am encouraged by something that Richard Ford wrote in his wonderful piece about his Bascombe novels in last Saturday's Guardian Review. "I have ... taken to heart Robert Frost's advice meant specifically for writers: that what we do when we write represents the last of our childhood, and we may for that reason practise it somewhat irresponsibly." I am sure that this could equally well be applied to readers: here's to irresponsible reading – as I consider dusting off, one more time, The 39 Steps.
