Including the one I keep buying and giving away, and the one I refuse to lend to anyone, ever.
Some weeks the world comes at you with a velocity that feels unkind. For those weeks I have a short list of books that function, for me, as a kind of slowing agent.
The first is W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which I have read four times and bought six copies of, because I keep giving it away. It is a book about a walking tour of Suffolk that becomes, gradually, a meditation on time and catastrophe and the persistence of beauty. It is very sad and very beautiful and completely unlike anything else.
The second is Elizabeth David's An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, a collection of food writing that is actually about pleasure, and memory, and the specific kinds of intelligence required to eat well. I read it in the same way I listen to certain music — not for information but for tone.
The third I will not name because I am afraid you will ask to borrow it and I will have to say no, which is an awkward conversation I have had too many times already.