Books for autumnFive books for a slower season

Autumn is when I want books I can read slowly, a few pages at a time, with something hot nearby. These five books for autumn are made for exactly that.

John Berger's Ways of Seeing is short and quietly changes how you look at every image afterwards, including the ones on this page. Maggie Nelson's Bluets is a book of numbered fragments about the colour blue, and about love and grief along the way. Virginia Woolf's The Waves follows six voices from childhood to middle age and reads more like music than a novel.

Then Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, about a young woman in Manhattan who decides to sleep through a whole year: sharp, dark and very funny. And Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, for the evenings when you need someone to tell you to be patient with yourself.