My comfort blanket books live permanently on my bedside table or in the bookcase in the bedroom, as well as the current books, leading to the mess my husband complains about. Pride and Prejudice (there's also a copy in my travel bag), Cold Comfort Farm, Little Women, Great Expectations, Rebecca, Swallows and Amazons, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Le Grand Meaulnes. Also poetry-for which I need to feel very desolate before I have the patience- Four Quartets, the complete Ted Hughes and anthologies of landscape poetry.
(Oh, and one I nearly forgot, the Magic Apple Tree)

Atwood's Surfacing and Kerouac's Desolation Angels. It's the isolated log cabin thing (not the creeping madness of Atwood's narrator) that gets me

At this point mine are mainly non-fiction-- memoirs, letters, etc. Yehudi Menhuin's Unfinished Journey is a favorite, as is Iris Origo's Images and Shadows and Gwen Raverat's Period Piece. Two volumes of the letters of William Maxwell. Also, Susan, your own Family, not comforting, maybe, but so forthright and so deeply consoling. On a lighter note, I used to read James Thurber if I woke in the night after a bad dream-- it worked like a charm.

Barbara Pym, especially Excellent Women and Glass of Blessings, Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, and Diary of a Provincial Lady by E M Delafield.

I capture the castle, The Young Visiters, any of the Dornford Yates 'Chandos' novels (Berry can be too damn cheerful when one is below par), Miss Pettigrew lives for a day, Eloise, any Mapp and Lucia.......and there's always a cookery book or two for the Inner Woman.

Yes, Greengage Summer, also In this house of Brede ( Rumer Godden again)To serve them all my days (Delderfield) Smoking Diaires (Simon Gray), I capture the castle (Dodi Smith) to name a few.
Also love collections of letters, diaires,memoirs etc so was interested to read the blog by Susan S.

Glad you were interested, Philippa. I too love I Capture the Castle. And also Greengage Summer-- did you ever see the movie of it with Susannah York which I remember as very appealing? I keep hoping that it will turn up on DVD, but no luck so far.

If I want a good old wallow I read Viginia Woolf's Diaries. Nothing else will do.

At the risk of being boring, I repeat my comfort blanket selection that I made on this blog some time ago - and it doesn't change. 'The Magic Apple Tree' and the writings of Thomas Traherne. Can't do without either.