'I'm on the hunt for humour and hope': what will authors be reading in 2020? | Books | The Guardian

Matt Haig

I have been very dark and gloomy with my reading habits this year, perhaps in tune with the social mood. Like a pig sniffing for truffles, I am going to hunt out humour and hope in the new year, and plan to reread Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quartet, which I haven't done since I was a teenager.

I have been told that Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi is very funny, so I will get that too. I also want to read Pablo Neruda's Odes to Common Things as I am a fan of Neruda and have never read it. It is about the pleasure we can take in everyday items in the world around us, from soap to tomatoes, and I am thinking it will be the perfect antidote to all the big-picture worrying the world is encouraging us to do. I feel a lot of us need to reconnect with the immediacy of the world around us, and so I will seek out books like this, in order to stay (relatively) hopeful about life.