Five of the best books to exercise your mind when you’re slumped on the sofa this Christmas.

The run-up to Christmas and the turkey-glutted days after are times when you should choose your reading wisely. You have leisure: time off work, and drowsy periods spent in armchairs by the fire. Here is the chance to become absorbed in a book for sheer pleasure. Use it. Slip the “funny” Christmas gift book your brother-in-law gave you quietly down the side of the sofa. Why not make the book you read intelligent as well as compelling? Here are a few suggestions for ways you might do just that.

by Mr Michael Lewis

Most of us look to fiction for our fun. But I mention this new nonfiction book anyway. Mr Michael Lewis is the man who wrote (among other things) The Big Short: he’s a superb storyteller. And this book, about how the friendship between the psychologists Mr Daniel Kahneman and Mr Amos Tversky ended up changing the way we think about the human mind, is funny and touching and eye-opening – plus, you’ll learn a lot from it, too.

by Mr MR James

Christmas isn’t Christmas without a ghost story. Mr MR James was one of the prize flowers in the spooky greenhouse of 19th-century literature, and you can find his work in all manner of editions. No, The Monkey’s Paw was the other guy (Mr WW Jacobs). But Mr James wrote some of the glories of the genre. Ancient churches, tattered manuscripts, and things that go “hmm” in the night.

by Sir John Mortimer

This is what you might think of as a blissful base camp on the lower slopes of Sir PG Wodehouse. It’s a sitcom starring a slightly threadbare criminal barrister with a fondness for cheap wine, a waistcoat marked by ash from his small cigars, and a nevertheless heroic regard for the presumption of innocence and the value of the common law. The stories are heavenly: funny, sometimes touching, and always in a narrow little compass. Dip in and out in between the festive feasting.

by Mr Michael Chabon

I would push more or less any book by Mr Michael Chabon on you – his The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay is better known, and just as good – but this one is a special treat for its sentence-by-sentence funniness and the wacky but compelling plot. It’s a noirish gumshoe story about a detective, set in an alternative reality where the Jewish homeland was established not in Palestine but in Alaska. A dead heroin addict whose arm is tied with a tefillin… and we’re off.

by Dame AS Byatt

This won the Booker Prize, and deserved it. Dame AS Byatt used her huge brain to construct a rip-snorting potboiler of a novel, about (bear with us) the entwined stories of two scholars of 19th-century literature and the writers they study. Seldom has scholarship been so gripping. The double time scheme near-on created a genre. And if you don’t fancy the spoof Victorian poetry (it’s good) you can skip it and enjoy the story with undiminished pleasure.