Clifton Fadiman's "Fantasia Mathematica" is short stories not a novel but I remember it fondly from long ago. But it's a May 6 dark, damp, and dreary Friday afternoon with more or the same to come this weekend when it should be all beautiful and springlike, so in that spirit I will recommend The Naked Lunch, Nana, and Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans.
Alan Furst's novels are light and cheering to people who like to read about Nazis being killed.
Novels I've read recently and liked a lot:
- Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle
- Sara Davis, The Scapegoat
- Sara Gran, The Book of the Most Precious Substance
I'm in the middle of Weike Wang's Joan is Okay and am enjoying it so far. None of these books could really be considered light and frivolous, though, and the Sara Gran and Sara Davis books are probably not for everyone.
More along the lines of light and frivolous -- I thought Dawnie Walton's The Final Revival of Opal & Nev was mostly pretty good. Taylor Jenkins Reid's Malibu Rising is pretty silly, but her writing is so great it's enjoyable to read anyway, and of the above list it's probably the closest to meeting the stated criteria.
Have you read any Angela Thirkell, Heebie? Light fiction--mildly satirical romance novels set among the pre-war (and mid-war; her post-war novels are generally not worth reading) gentry in the UK's West Country. Like Nero Wolfe, one of the pleasures is that there's a bunch of them; if you like the first one you try there are a dozen more that are going to be essentially the same.
The last novel I read was Jim Crace's The Melody, which is like doing a bump of melancholia so I wouldn't recommend it for light frivolousness, and the one before that was Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall which is both short and fantastic but is a slow will-they-or-won't-they book about whether the characters are actually going to sacrifice the teenage-girl narrator in their dumb Stone Age reenactment weekend, so, uh, let me also recommend The Diary of a Provincial Lady.
This is great! The other criteria is that they have to be available on our fairly shitty list of ebooks from the local library consortium, so getting a longer list of options is helpful.
Don't Hate the Player by Alexis Nedd. It's got teen romance, esports, betrayal, and a tiger mom.
It's fantasy, but you might enjoy In Other Lands.
Elliot doesn't want to fight, keeps saying the wrong thing, and is definitely the grouchiest human in fantasyland.
try silvia moreno garcia, such fun plotting i just really enjoy her books for this kind of reading. gods of jade & shadow, mexican gothic, & velvet was the night - recommend all haven't read earlier books but the better half says even signal to noise one of her early books already had the plot thing going.
Do you like mysteries? The Maisie Dobbs series is great comfort reading. Maise is a plucky 'psychologist and investigator' in post-WWI London. They gentle, given that they often involve murders and all the characters have PTSD, and they're mostly light on the love story angle.
I finally read The Cruel Sea on ajay's recommendation, and I really enjoyed it. Thanks ajay!
But it's not light and frivolous and was almost impossible to get my hands on.
2: I just picked up the latest Alan Furst novel and it is comically terrible. Which is too bad-- his best books are so good!
Have you tried reading 1/3rd of the way through Mort and then keeping in on the table for five years?
Wodehouse? The good thing is he wrote a lot, so if you like it there's a lot more. Start with the Mulliner stories.
I recommended John Sandford's Virgil Flowers police novels to ogged and he liked them - entertaining and well written.
Weighting towards recent, American and female:
Egan's "goon squad" I liked a lot.
Bridget Jones' Diary I thought was a stylistic masterpiece.
Grace Paley's short stories?
Thurber
I liked "the Golem and the Djinni" a lot.
After striking out on a bunch of these (but placing holds, at least on some), I finally got a SM Garcia, where the bully in the first few pages is named Teofilo.
It's good when people pick pseuds based on literature.
I asked Labrys for recommendations and here's what she offered:
"The Kiss Quotient" Helen HOANG: Asian American, autism, + romance
"My Grandmother asked me to tell you she's sorry" Fredrick BACKMAN: read out loud
"The story of Jane" Laura KAPLAN: necessary given the Dobbs draft
"The Blue Place" Nicola GRIFFITH: mystery
"Shark Dialogues" Kiana DAVENPORT
"Ladyparts" Deborah COPAKEN: read out loud
"Digging to America" Anne TYLER
"Moon Called" Patricia BRIGGS: my preferred light reading, I put them on hold as soon as they're announced
"Crazy Rich Asians" Kevin KWAN
"The Borrower" Rebecca MAKKAI
I'm glad MattD liked The Cruel Sea but was surprised it was so difficult to get hold of. Its a fixture in second hand bookshops IME along with Dan Brown and Dick Francis. Maybe this is a UK thing though.
5: Sarah Moss is a friend of a friend (he shows up in her Iceland memoir) and I have questions, but I am not sure that I would actually want answers.
I may have mentioned here before that I'm part of an eclectic book blog The Frumious Consortium, though we are a bit long on F&SF as well as, in my precincts, history of the Central and Eastern European variety. So uplifting!
Co-blogger Doreen also writes for criminal element where the killing is on a merely retail scale, so that may be a better source of books you like.
I just wrote about Meddling Kids which is a darkly funny look at what might have happened if the Scooby kids took up a case again as youngish adults after it went badly off-piste the first time around.
The Eighth Life is a sprawling saga of the late 19th and 20th centuries in the Georgia where people's names end in -shvili. It's by Nino Haratischvili.
Say Goodbye by Lewis Shiner is kinda Almost Famous with a female singer-songwriter who's trying to hit it big in the '90s. If you like that, you'll probably also like Outside the Gates of Eden which is a lot more life and music from just before Dylan went electric through the 2010s. It's much longer. He's a Texas author, so your library system might have more of his work.
If you like mysteries, I think a lot of Georgette Heyer's mysteries have the advantage that no one liked the victim.
Today's Taylordle is very confusing.
19: Oh, I really enjoyed the book and would be happy to talk about it. (As I said, it's also quite good and quite short, so you could just read it and answer the questions for yourself.)
re: 10.last
His more recent novels have been so bad it's insulting to the reader. I think the first couple are really excellent (Dark Star; Night Soldiers), and then the quality drops off a bit, and then it drops of catastrophically from after Kingdom of Shadows onwards.
23: I got it in 5, though I thought my 4th guess was better than the actual answer (change the last letter and you get one of the words from the title of one of her most famous songs). The actual answer seems to be a completely fake album which nonetheless has a complete tracklist and history of its release including how it charter on fan sites. I'm baffled.
Where we go one, we go all, except to Jake Gyllenhaal's couch.
For chick lit, you might enjoy Beth O'Leary, and I second the recommendation of the Maisie Dobbs series. I've been enjoying Anna Lee Huber's books as well.
Thrice Upon a Time by James Hogan is set in an alternate today and is an interesting conundrum worked through.
Elanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell was charming and sweet, but mostly romance.
Jasper Fforde has a literary detective series that my wife loves to bits, The Eyre Affair is a good place to start.
The Devil Wears Prada book is fun if you haven't read that yet.
I'm not sure I've mentioned these on here, but I have read a whole bunch of light, soothing novels since the pandemic started. I mostly lost my ability to read science fiction and fantasy because I lost my ability to believe in a future that I'd want to read about (although I made the mistake of reading the first chapter of KSR's big climate change one, do not make this mistake) so I read a bunch of other stuff.
My favorites were Dodie Smith's less well-known novels - they are absolutely fantastic, much better than I Capture The Castle.
The New Moon With The Old might be my favorite and does not go in the direction you think it's going.
Her novels are notable for early and positive depiction of gay people.
I also read all the Barbara Pym, but they are, as my father remarked, a little acid. The least acidic are probably Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings.
If you've never read Mrs. Dalloway, I recommend it highly - a book like a flowing stream, you won't have trouble getting into it.
Also, have you read any Doris Lessing? The Diaries of Jane Somers are a bit different from a lot of her stuff and while they have quite a lot in them that is sad, they are pretty interesting. I'd say that they actually changed my life, because they prompted me to spend a bit more time with a relative in her last few years. (If you are similarly prompted to spend time with aged relatives, note that in retrospect I wish I had spent even more time with her.)
I recently read the first few Carter Dickson mysteries and got very into them - after a while the series gets very same-y, but up through Death In Five Boxes they're pretty engaging.
One Hundred and One Dalmations was an excellent book on tape for a long drive.
barbara pym! god i love her books. just so much excellence and hilarious.
so long as we are venturing out of purely light fiction territory ... penelope fitzgerald, just fabulous, you can't go wrong. the beginning of spring is an annual reread for me. at freddie's, of course the blue flower, just pick one up after another and be astonished they are so damn good.
sylvia townsend warner in particular, the corner that held them is a stone cold fucking masterpiece, just astonishingly good. lolly willowes is great, summer will show, the flint anchor ... yum! and if you can find a copy, the essays in scenes of childhood are wonderful, some of the best reading aloud to your family you will ever find. the essay about her french teacher, or the one about boiling an egg, the fire at the school ... delight after delight.
just remembering the part in i think excellent women (?) when the heroine (ha! lol) is fantasizing about knitting the clerical dude a sweater vest as a means of seduction and it's all going swimmingly until she arrives at the tricky triple decrease to form the v-neck that she never manages to pull off neatly, so *that* fantasy gets hastily jettisoned ... pure pym comic genius.
One series I really liked, as a deliberately Chandler-esque set of noirs with a female Korean-American hero, is Steph Cha's series.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steph_Cha#Juniper_Song_mysteries
My favorites were Dodie Smith's less well-known novels - they are absolutely fantastic, much better than I Capture The Castle.
Just as well, that Thorn is no longer commenting here.
heebie, did you see that Jennifer Egan wrote a sequel to A Visit from the Goon Squad? The Candy House -- probably doesn't meet your current specs, but I'm pretty sure I remember that you love A Visit.
While I'm posting, I suppose I could make my reading suggestions.
Novels
Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Nonfiction
Let the Record Show by Sarah Schulman
I also love Penelope Fitzgerald, and will single out Offshore and The Gate of Angels as favorites. A third commenter could round it out with specific recs for any we've missed. Just ridiculously consistently superb.
Have you read Sean Stewart's A Perfect Circle? Set in a Houston summer. It's kind of fantasy, in that the main character sees ghosts, but really, really good.
Also, second the recommendation for In Other Lands. It's one of my top ten favorite books.
Just read In Other Lands. It was pretty fun.