Reading isn’t racing … unless you have a plane to catch

There is nothing worse for the voracious reader than to be engrossed in the thick of an imposing tome when the day of the summer holiday arrives

Afriend of mine is fond of saying that literature is not a race. What she means is that it’s not a competition — nobody is timing how long it has taken you to finish Gravity’s Rainbow, say, or no one cares whether you get through The Man Without Qualities first.

But in the summer, when holidays are planned and travel looms, reading does seem to take on a sudden urgency, as if books were cartons of milk and had finite expiration dates. The nearer your departure date draws, the more precarious each unconsumed carton looks, lying there in the refrigerator, still so much left to drink before you leave.

Or to return to the original metaphor, you have to sprint through the book you’re reading before time begins on your holiday. It’s at this point that literature does indeed become a race.

Selecting a book for a vacation is a delicate task. It cannot be rushed: the right book vibrates on the shelf with a certain mysterious energy, and seems in fact to beckon for the suitcase or the overnight bag. Many factors are considered: there are matters of weight (not too heavy to lug around); difficulty (nothing so demanding that it intimidates you into choosing a movie instead on the plane); and of course length (nothing so short that you will finish it over the course of a transatlantic flight). But this process is for nought if you aren’t ready for new material.

You have to be done reading everything else — literary slate clean, all set to begin something untouched. There is nothing worse for the voracious reader than to be engrossed in the thick of an imposing tome when the day of the summer holiday arrives. Do you ditch it and start fresh? Or drag it along and wind up mid-way?

So the period before travel is charged with the seriousness of this dilemma. I find that in the weeks leading up to a lengthy summer holiday, I am neurotic to the point of paralysis about each new book I pick up and how many pages I make it through daily. It won’t do to simply breeze through, because wrapping one book up several days before it’s time to leave means having to choose another stop-gap read in the interim. Nor is it any good to crawl too slowly in the lead-up, as you don’t want to be stuck on departure day only part of the way through.

How often — embarrassingly — I have spent the precious hours before heading to the airport scrambling to complete some chunky paperback whose size I had apparently underestimated, loathe to head out the door with a few dozen measly pages to go.

We think of summer reading as a time of leisure — of casual perusing and of leafing through some elementary potboiler wrapped in a beach towel. But the summer read, the stalwart literary holiday companion, is not earned without considerable strife and labour. It takes serious toil to get to the point where a mere novel can provide the right kinds of satisfaction and hit the pleasure centres of the weary brain. For the devoted reader it takes commitment and scheduling on a level the vacation bingewatcher and mobile-gamer could hardly even imagine.

Oh – but the reward it offers. The joy of settling into an economy-class recliner, many departure-lounge whiskies downed, tray table locked for now in the upright position and then, cracking the spine on an immaculate book poised for the reading, is worth the arduous challenge. That summer-read finish line is well worth the race.