Sophie Gee wonders what Jane Austen would make of our festive bestseller lists - Nigella, self-help and all

My standard practice, when choosing Christmas books, is to make a panicked lap of the local bookshop, grabbing titles at random. But this year I have attempted a more empirically satisfying solution. Instead of trying to remember what my friends and family like to read, I am asking why they read at all.

This new approach was suggested by the opening sentences of Jane Austen's Persuasion, which give the best description of reading I know:

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.

Even as we laugh at Sir Walter for his snobbishly trivial turn of mind, we admire Austen for putting her finger so exactly on what gives reading its delight: "occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one". Which of us doesn't have an equivalent of the Baronetage to take down in hours of need, hoping that nobody is looking?

And, at Christmas, they are more vital than ever. At no other time are "unwelcome sensations arising from domestic affairs" so much in evidence. Eating, drinking, present-giving and receiving, party invitations, clothes, diets, family gatherings: every activity perfectly calibrated to do lasting neurological and psychological damage. Since Austen herself has enjoyed another year of brisk sales and lucrative tie-in merchandise, it seems appropriate that Sir Walter's categories should guide our Christmas choices.

"Occupation for an idle hour" is the first condition on his list. Several books out this Christmas are aimed to cure excessive idleness, the pre-eminent among them being Do Ants Have Arseholes? And 101 Other Bloody Ridiculous Questions (Sphere), Amazon.co.uk's number one bestseller at the time of writing. Nigella Lawson's Nigella Express (Chatto & Windus) and Jamie Oliver's Jamie at Home (Michael Joseph) would also help t0 quell domestic malaise. If only Sir Walter could have availed himself of Jamie's invitation to cook his way to the good life by way of "hot smoked salmon with an amazing chilli salsa", the Elliot family's financial disasters, which bring Persuasion into being, might well have been avoided.

Other Christmas 2007 bestsellers keep the wolf of idleness from the door of occupation, too: Mick O'Hare's How to Fossilise Your Hamster: And 99 Other Experiments to Try At Home (Profile Books), or Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic and Baby (Bantam). If it seems like a stretch to imagine an 18th-century aristocrat enjoying a Sophie Kinsella novel, remember that excessive interest in shopping, coupled with a preoccupation with heredity, are Sir Walter Elliot's defining traits.

"Consolation in a distressed hour" is the second requirement of a good book. Paul McKenna's bluntly titled, and bestselling, book-and-CD package I Can Make You Thin (Bantam) promises consolation in lavish measure - while the level of psychic strain that one would have to be under to buy a book with such a title most definitely indicates distress. But Sir Walter's first self-help choice would probably coincide with that of every other visitor to Amazon in 2007: The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (Simon & Schuster). The disappointed customer reviews ("deeply flawed", says one) might make him wonder whether Byrne's New Age tips for acquiring health, happiness and, most importantly, wealth could save him from exchanging his stately home for a rental property in Bath. But he would have to be encouraged by Amazon's promise that Einstein, Plato and Galileo owe their collective success to Byrne's counsel.

Consolation, however, is not the dominant note struck by this year's bestsellers. When J K Rowling passes around the cup of comfort in the epilogue to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Bloomsbury), it is very lame indeed. Who wanted to see Ron buying Hermione a 12-cup stainless-steel Cuisinart for Christmas, or Harry hoovering chip crumbs out of the family car? If only Rowling had left consolation to Sophie Kinsella, and stuck more strictly to what she does best: killing off major characters and disseminating rumours about their sexual orientation.

Two major war-zone bestsellers, Khaled Hosseini's Afghan saga A Thousand Splendid Suns (Bloomsbury) and Ishmael Beah's boy-soldier memoir A Long Way Gone (Fourth Estate), confirm that comfort wasn't really what people wanted in 2007. But Sir Walter gives us a category for this reading experience: one in which the "faculties are roused into admiration and respect".

These emotions may also be provoked by less heroic feats. Amazon prominently features a video about Kate Mosse's new, Da Vinci Code-esque thriller Sepulchre (Orion), in which Mosse sips thoughtfully on a large glass of Chardonnay while unveiling the Gothic horrors awaiting her readers - pausing to remind them that the Chardonnay grape, like her novel, is a product of France. After a recent hapless appearance at a London pub to speak about my own historical novel, I can measure very exactly the degree of respect to which my faculties are roused by this show of strength on Mosse's part.

"Pity and contempt" are probably the hardest to satisfy among Sir Walter's requirements. The high rankings of worthy, improving writing, such as Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain (Macmillan), Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (Jonathan Cape) and Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française (Chatto & Windus), suggest a disturbing absence of misanthropy and an alarming trend toward humility and self- improvement. Instead of feeling pity and contempt for others, we have begun to feel it for ourselves. The remarkable ranking of Indian Food Made Easy (number 24) confirms this hypothesis - we are willing to overlook our weaknesses (non-mastery of the Indian kitchen, for example) and try to do our best. Had the "For Dummies" series emerged in late 18th-century Britain, Sir Walter's pity and contempt might have been channelled into useful self-improvement - and Jane Austen wouldn't have needed to write Persuasion at all.

But Sir Walter has taken down the Baronetage hundreds of times, and despite all the feelings it inspires in him, his life is still a disaster. Austen is really making a joke at writers' expense - however much readers love a book, it is unlikely to change their lives - and she gives a little wink to this idea in Persuasion's opening lines.

In the 18th century, the powerlessness of books was a big problem. Novels were considered dangerously frivolous, trapping readers into feeling pleasure without forcing them into self-improvement. It is still a problem today - what's the point of reading books if they don't actually make us do anything? Today, the success of self-help and cookery books confirms that we are nervous of reading, still unsure as to the purpose it serves. Austen, along with other 18th-century writers, wanting to make novel-reading respectable, came up with a defence of reading for its own sake. Their argument was that it is as important to have feelings as it is to commit actions. They claimed that "sympathy", the ability to identify imaginatively with other people's feelings, is just as important to social life as moral and political action.

The result is that we don't have to try hard to make books seem respectable. The opposite is true. Books - from Nigella Express to On Chesil Beach - are what make us respectable. They give us occupation in an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one.

"The Scandal of the Season" by Sophie Gee is published by Chatto & Windus

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