The best books to make you laugh and feel better

Looking through the small ads in the back of my parents’ newspaper (we got really bored before the internet), I saw one for a holistic detective agency – ‘missing cats and messy divorces a speciality’. My sister dared me to call. When I did, I heard a message saying, ‘This is Dirk Gently. If you’d like to leave a message, you can’t.’ It then revealed the existence of the book, which of course I bought.

It’s my favourite Douglas Adams: set in the real world, but standing at a finely calculated distance from reality. There’s the character who’s killed early on, but continues regardless. There’s the software that tells you why it’s a good idea to do whatever it is you want to do (the Pentagon uses an outdated version). There’s the sofa that gets wedged in a staircase in contravention of all known physics.

Then there’s Dirk himself, a living enigma who spends much of the book eating pizza. And there’s his immortal phrase ‘the fundamental interconnectedness of all things’, which allows him to search for a missing cat by, for example, going on holiday to Spain.

The book was, and remains, a magical thing.

This was among the first (and by far the best) of my parents’ books that I borrowed.

The premise is charming: after a long and careful study of British history, your memory will retain only a small quantity of garbled nonsense; so why not save time by just reading the garbled nonsense? At its best, it’s so freewheelingly, surreally silly that I still vividly remember crying with laughter. There were bits – like the names of the Wave of Pretenders – that made me laugh every time I read them.

It was a revelation to me that adults – and even adults from the past – could have brains that were just as silly, odd, and obscure as children’s.

I read this during a period of temping when I was at university, and it was like an enchanted escape capsule from my job.

It was written in the late nineteenth century, but it doesn’t have the kind of starchy, pious formality of a lot of writing from that time. It feels very free and very modern, rooted in the details of everyday life that probably stay quite constant throughout history – like cheeky kids, the failure of all forms of waterproofing, and how annoying our friends are when we’re confined with them for any length of time.

It’s based on Jerome’s honeymoon trip up the Thames, but with his wife diplomatically replaced by two imaginary friends and a dog.

I’d never read any PG Wodehouse before I found this in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. My edition is a huge and ancient green volume that looks like a book of magic – and it is.

It contains all the Jeeves and Wooster stories from the very beginning till the end of their golden age. And they’re in order, so you see the characters and style develop, and watch Bertie follow PG himself to America and back.

It came to me just when I needed it most: I had an absolutely horrible job at the time, the sort where you start dreading Monday morning around about lunchtime on Saturday. Being able to slip away into these stories was like owning a portal to a better world. They contain so many pleasures.

For one thing, PG can construct a sentence that somehow transcends its constituent words to become almost unbearably precious and charming. For another, the stories let you slip away into a parallel life in which you have a private income, a Mayfair flat and an omnipotent servant.

You rise late, eat breakfast in bed, bathe and dress, then stroll through London to your club. Your only problems are caused by overbearing aunts, friends in need and your own good nature. Occasionally, you bicker with Jeeves, but in the end he gets you out of whatever jam you’re in, and you reciprocate by destroying the vulgar shoes/tie/socks of which he disapproves. There has never been a better way to wash away reality.

This is the strangest of the books I’ve chosen. I found it by accident while looking for something else in the British Library, and loved it immediately. The writer was George VI’s doctor, and this is his only novel.

On the surface, it’s the story of a grotesquely unlikeable and hypocritical father and son. But I prefer to ignore that and just enjoy its completely unique voice. The whole book is like a PG Wodehouse sentence: somehow transcending its literal meaning to become almost magically pleasing. It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you enjoy the phrase ‘the aunt that had stood with my mother’s mother at the foot of the stairs’ then you’ll like it.