How to curate a themed reading list for rainy weekends and quiet revelations

When I first started rooting through the secondhand shelves of a tiny bookshop in Brighton, I kept finding the same thing: novels with dust jackets browned at the edges, author names I recognised from footnotes or literary histories, and blurbs that promised something sharper than the marketing had delivered at the time. These were not the prizewinning giants of the 1970s nor the ephemeral beach reads; they were the midlist authors—writers who...

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There are books that show you a historical date, a set of facts and figures. Then there are novels that make history feel like a living room you can enter — the creak of a floorboard, the smell of cooking, the small, embarrassing, humane gestures that make people into people rather than footnotes. Reading for empathy means choosing the latter. Over the years I’ve kept returning to novels that quietly recast moments of the past by refusing...

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I remember the first time I opened a restored edition of a book I had already read in a cheaper paperback: the pages felt like someone had taken a curtain aside and shown me a room I thought I’d known. Restored and annotated editions do something like that. They don’t simply reprint words; they reframe, re-weigh and sometimes rewrite our relationship with a text. For books that have been neglected—out of print, misread, or climactically...

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I love the little thrill that comes when a book you thought you knew finds a surprising echo in something new. Pairing a neglected classic with a contemporary counterpart is one of my favourite reading games: it sharpens attention, reveals continuities across time, and lifts both books out of their solitary orbit so they illuminate each other. Below I offer a practical, hands-on guide to doing this well—whether you’re reading alone, planning...

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I remember the first time a debut novel by a writer from an underrepresented background stopped me mid-page and made me reorder my reading list. It wasn’t just the novelty of a voice I hadn’t heard before; it was the way the book treated time, memory, and small domestic details as if they were maps to larger truths. That feeling — of being led somewhere I hadn’t expected — is why I argue that some debut novels deserve more than a brief...

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I still remember the thrill of opening a novelist’s backlist for the first time—the sense that a whole world of books had been waiting, quietly, behind the one everyone had been talking about. Backlists are where you find the brittle early experiments, the maturer masterpieces, the misfires that teach you as much about an author as their triumphs. Approached well, they’re a route map through an artist’s mind; approached badly, they can...

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I confess: serialized Victorian novels used to intimidate me. The idea of starting a book that sprawled across months (or years) of instalments felt like opening a ledger rather than sinking into a story. Then I started treating these works as invitations to pace myself, to savour recurring rhythms and cliffhangers—and the experience changed. If you’ve ever wanted to read Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray or lesser-known serialized gems without...

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I still remember the first time I realised my relationship with crime fiction could be more than Nordic thrillers and blockbuster TV adaptations. A reader at the shop asked me for “something like Stieg Larsson but not Swedish,” and I felt that familiar tug—between the comfort of a known formula and the excitement of discovery. If you love the meticulous plotting and moral anger of Lisbeth Salander’s world, there is much to explore beyond...

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I keep a small stack of nineteenth‑century poetry on my desk at all times — not the canonical handful everyone learns in school, but a scattered assemblage of voices that used to sit at the edges of anthologies. Over the last few years I’ve been deliberately making space on my shelves for women poets from that century, and the results have felt quietly revolutionary. They’ve changed how I read, what I notice about history, and how I...

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I open nearly every translated book these days with two small but powerful rituals: I skim the translation notes (if there are any) and I check who the translator is. Over years of reading across languages, I’ve learned that these tiny sections — a paragraph at the back, a prefatory essay, a translator’s note at the start of each chapter — can tell you more about how a book will feel in English than many reviews do. They are not just dry...

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