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I can't quite shake my winter blues. Things aren't going quite as planned with work. DH and I need to move house again shortly, and it's tricky to coordinate with our child's school timetable. I used to read a lot, but I fell into an exhausted postnatal slump and lost my momentum. Lately a I find myself reading a lot of short articles online and not being able to focus on anything longer. I think it's time I returned to reading paperbacks, but I spent half and hour in a bookshop at the airport last week and couldn't find anything to pique my interest.


I like scifi (eg Heinlein, Le Guin etc) and books with quirky humor (eg Pratchett or Tom Robbins). I don't think I can stomach anything sad or dramatic atm, and certainly nothing too philosophical/esoteric. I'm looking for something really engaging, it doesn't necessarily need to be fiction. It probably shouldn't be too long, or I'll lose the plot -- literally.


Any suggestions, Forumites?

:)

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well ... I find novels which are set outside in wide open spaces or woods and where the geographical setting is a strong component very soothing .


re reading Lee Child and C J Box has got me through a lot when concentration was not available to me .


Good plots ,v satisfactory endings ,99% of the time happy ones and ,especially with CJ Box a lovely sense of place ,strong geographical setting .


And Guy Gavriel Kay is heavenly for sense of place - sort of fantasy set in medieval and pre medieval times . But possibly a little too dark for you at the moment .

Louis de Bernieres, Captain Corelli is well known, but his Latin American trilogy are great literature and laugh out-loud funny with some magical-realism thrown in to give you a good mix of fantasy-humour-narrative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_de_Berni%C3%A8res


If you fancy something chewier how about some Gabriel Garcia Marquez? One Hundred Years of Solitude is a good start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Garc%C3%ADa_M%C3%A1rquez

  • 3 months later...

Update--


So I was toying with the idea of getting Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf (because what's more cheerful than the existential crisis of a werewolf, right?)... but then Matt Haig's The Humans crossed my path, so I'm going with that for now. It's proving quite entertaining in a quirky philosophical way, though I'm only about 20 pages into it.

Have you tried Haroun and the Sea of Stories? Although marketed as a children's book it's very good fun for adults, especially if you like fantasy, very funny and very apposite for the times in which we live. Having read six of Rushdie's novels I'd say it's possibly his finest book.

I just read Absolute Pandemonium, an instalment of Brian Blessed's autobiography, which was very entertaining and uplifting. Got it from the library.


If you don't have much headspace or energy, I'd also recommend the Agatha Raisin detective series by MC Beaton. Far from literary and the editor needs a serious talking-to but the characterisation is amusing.

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