The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Jerome K. Jerome wrote these essays in an era when people still had the luxury to contemplate the proper way to do nothing. The result is a delightful parade of trivial dilemmas: should you wear the grey dress or the red one? Is it worse to be early or late? Why does a train always depart the moment you step into the corridor? These are not essays about anything important. That's precisely the point. Jerome transforms the small anxieties and indecisions of daily existence into comedy that feels startlingly contemporary. His narrator is the archetypal everyman, agonising over questions no one admits to caring about, then confessing it all with disarming honesty. The prose has the quality of a clever friend holding forth in a comfortable chair, making you laugh at recognisable follies you didn't know deserved laughter. Nearly 130 years later, it remains the perfect book for anyone who suspects that life is mostly spent worrying about things that don't matter, and that this is somehow the most human thing of all.