A rainy day creates a specific reading mood: contemplative, slightly melancholy, suited to books that match the grey light outside rather than fighting it. The best books for rain are not necessarily sad books — they are books with a certain quality of interiority, a willingness to slow down and pay attention to small things, a prose that rewards the kind of reading that happens when you are not quite sure whether it is noon or three in the afternoon because the light has not changed at all.
Stoner by John Williams is the rainy-day novel by definition. It is about the interior life of a man who teaches literature for forty years in a midwestern university, and the novel gives that interior life the attention it deserves. The rain in Stoner — and there is rain, though the novel does not announce its weather — is part of the texture of the life it describes. Reading it on a grey afternoon produces the specific pleasure of feeling precisely located in time and weather while the man on the page is in a different time and different weather that is recognizably the same.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is the rainy-day book for people who have lost someone or are thinking about loss. Didion writes about the year after her husband John Gregory Dunne's sudden death with clinical precision and without false consolation. The "magical thinking" of the title is the belief, which she identifies and documents in herself, that the dead can return if the right conditions are met. The book is not comfortable — Didion is not a comfortable writer — but it is true in a way that makes the discomfort feel like exactly the right companion for a long grey afternoon.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion is for the rainy days when you want cultural melancholy rather than personal grief. The essays in this collection — about California in the 1960s, about the center not holding, about the specific quality of endings that don't announce themselves — are organized around a sadness that is historical and personal simultaneously. The title essay, about Haight-Ashbury in 1967, is one of the great pieces of immersive journalism, and it reads best when the world outside your window is also in the process of not quite adding up.
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson is set on the edge of a lake in Idaho, in a town where it rains and floods are a recurring fact of life. The novel is suffused with water — Sylvie leaves the windows open in rain, the house is full of leaves and damp — and its subject, transience and what it means to keep house against the constant pressure of dissolution, is exactly suited to reading in rain. Robinson's prose is the most precisely lyrical in contemporary American fiction, and it reads differently when there is actual weather outside your window.
Just Kids by Patti Smith is a rainy-day book for different reasons — not because it is melancholy, exactly, but because it is suffused with the specific nostalgia of a world that has passed, the New York of the 1960s and 70s, and reading about it on a grey afternoon produces the particular pleasure of being in two places at once: the present and the past that the book describes. Smith's prose is careful without being precious, and the love story at the center of the memoir is among the most honestly rendered in the form.
The rainy-day book is the one that makes you want the rain to continue. When you look up from the page and notice that it has stopped, you feel a faint disappointment: the excuse for staying inside has ended, and you will have to stop soon. The books above are the ones most likely to produce that feeling — which is, in the end, the highest recommendation any book for a specific occasion can receive.