Hi everyone!
I come to you in a great time of need, as this subreddit has helped me before (and there are some really great recommendations here).
The situation is as follows: I am currently doing my PhD in literature, and my primary corpus includes Beckett, Blanchot, and a bunch of other guys who really keep me on my toes—making me spiral daily about things like nothingness, silence, the void, and all kinds of fun!
However, I am looking for something to read that could really help me unwind. I’m thinking cozy, simple books that will help me relax and won’t make me go through existential crises. The only requirement is that they are not written like a 15-year-old’s fanfic or just a hodgepodge of tropes bundled together for someone to yell "bingo."
As a side note: I’m from the Hunger Games–Divergent–Cassandra Clare-was-still-great generation, so all of those oldies have already been read and are well in the past. I’m not looking specifically for something similar, but they are great examples of how ‘easy’ I want these books to be.
Thank you!
by boombam13
6 Comments
Ilona Andrews Innkeeper Chronicles –A magic Inn, space werewolves and vampires, a lot of really unique aliens, mystery, romance, action, a fun and humorous series
Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series accomplished this nicely for me. Book one is called *A Deadly Education*.
Fair warning that the main character is (if I recall correctly) 16 or 17 in the first book, and since it’s a 1st person narrative, a lot of that narrative is accurate to the general musings/thought processes of a 16-17 year old girl. But I think Novik does a genuinely excellent job at capturing the goings-on inside the mind of a socially-outcast teenager very very well.
It can be considered YA in the same way *Hunger Games* can be considered YA. Very fun palate cleanser type of read amongst a sea of literature and heavy topics!
You remind me of myself when I finished my MA in English literature (having decided I could not take academia seriously enough to do a PhD as well). I was delighted to be able to finally just read whatever I felt like reading. The first two novels I read were A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood, and The Hours, by Michael Cunningham, but I wouldn’t call either “cozy.”
I assume you’ve read PG Wodehouse? In the last few years, I’ve read a lot of his really early novels, before he totally hit his stride, and it’s fun watching him become himself, in a sense. I’m also a fan of the soothing prose of Agatha Christie. Both have their racism, of course, especially Christie. Add a big scoop of antisemitism in her work too. But I’m sure you come across those things often enough in your work. Dickens is really cozy too, but less so as his predilection for teenage girls becomes achingly obvious. I’ve just read a couple of lesbian pulp novels from the 50s and 60s. Not exactly cozy, and some not well written, but light and very interesting from a cultural history perspective.
I’m all for re-reading kids’ books. You might try the All of a Kind Family series, especially if you have American Jewish heritage (but even if you don’t). I recently read the City of Light series, which was cute, the first novel being the best. Don’t bother with the last book in the series (super obvious “message”).
May I humbly suggest non-fiction by non-academics? I read a lot of that in the first few years out of my MA. It was the first time I really understood that non-fiction can be beautifully written, unlike academic writing. It was also a good break from work; since I was teaching college English, any time I read fiction, I found myself creating lesson plans in my head. I really enjoyed Bill Bryson, for example, and Peter Mayle.
I do have lots to recommend by more diverse authors, but not that fall into the “cozy” category.
Dungeon Crawler Carl.
I like Lisa Lutz: she did a really fun book with another author called Heads You Lose where they took turns writing a chapter at a time. I also like her book The Passenger and The Accomplice. She’s in the mystery/crime genre so unsure if that is “cozy” but I find her books pretty well-constructed but not difficult.
{{Greenglass House by Kate Milford}} is a excellent cozy YA supernatural/magical realism mystery set in a fictional American town in an alternate history.