The 10 best loo books of 2014: why we sing so much better in the shower and what became of Queen Victoria’s children’s milk teeth

Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I know favour ‘bog books’. And having written one or two books myself that teeter on the edge of frivolity, I know that for your book to be kept in what Americans call the ‘bathroom’ is essentially a compliment. As long as it’s there to be read, of course.

Oddly enough, the two best loo books of the year I have already and separately reviewed in these pages. The Most of Nora Ephron (Doubleday, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £16.50) is an immaculately chosen compilation of the late American humorist’s journalism, blogs, meditations and random riffs, topped off with an extract from her best-known screenplay When Harry Met Sally. (If you have come to her through her two recent books of essays, it overlaps only a little with them and so is still worth acquiring.)

Michael Frayn’s Matchbox Theatre (Faber, £12.99, Spectator Bookshop, £10.99) is the most highbrow humorous book of this or any other year, a collection of 30 brief, abstract sketches, designed to be performed in the most intimate theatre space of them all, your own head. It’s also very funny, a rare and beautiful thing in itself.

Here, then, are the best of the rest. 1,411 QI Facts to Knock You Sideways (Faber, £10.99, Spectator Bookshop, £9.89) is the third of these silly fact compilations in as many years, but maintains the high standards of inconsequentiality attained by the first two. There are 60 people in Venezuela whose first name is Hitler. Eating 20 million bananas would give you a fatal dose of radioactivity. Queen Victoria had jewellery made out of her children’s milk teeth.

As a dedicated trivia-hound myself, I will admit to having heard one or two of these before, but there’s always something extraordinary awaiting you on the following page.