What I read on my summer vacation

In an old Vanity Fair that someone left in the outhouse, I have just read that there is a suite in the Ritz in Paris that goes for $17,000 a night.

I myself have reached an age at which I don’t think, really, I could pack enough into a night to justify the expense. Still, some people must — or so I think as I make my through the woods from the facilities to the old log cottage where, thanks to the generosity of friends, we have had our summer vacation for more years than I now care to add up.

The early mornings can be chilly on Lake Temagami by the time August is hinting at September. Which would be one of the differences between the Ritz and this island. I don’t suppose you have to wear a fleecy and woollen socks and pyjamas and old tennis shoes to go to the bathroom when you are a guest at the Ritz.

There is a picture in the magazine of the sitting room of the Imperial Suite ($17,770 U.S. per night, to be precise). And while I admit the chandelier looks like fun, and while the red-brocade conjures all kinds of Helmut Newton fantasies, there is something missing.

There is not a book in sight. Nor does it look like there is any comfortable place to curl up and enjoy one.

A few years ago, our daughter referred to our annual time in Temagami as Camp Reading. We swim, we canoe, we eat, we empty the mousetraps every morning before making coffee — and we all roam the island throughout the day like monks devoted to the printed word. “OK, I’m finished the McEwan. Is the Sedaris free?” This is the kind of conversation we have at Camp Reading when we aren’t menu planning or tapping the barometer and talking about the weather.

Books have their own kind of residency here. There is the permanent collection: Charles Gordon’s At the Cottage can always be found next to Doug Bennet’s and Tim Tiner’s Up North. That would be next to the Peterson Field Guide to Birds. And that would be next to the tattered paperback that at least once a summer, in the heat of Scrabble, inspires someone (insistent that “addax” is a word) to say: “Remind me next year to bring up a decent dictionary.” Which, of course, nobody ever does.

And then there are the seasonal guests: over various summers, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson have elbowed their way into my annual resolution to read Proust. Which I do anyway in the late afternoons, with a luxurious slowness greatly abetted by a gin and tonic and the view of the distant shore.

Unlike the Ritz, there are lots of places to read here, although they are weather and time-of-day dependent.

It’s warm on the other side of the boathouse most mornings, although the enormous dock spiders can be unnerving. The bow of the boat is good in the afternoons unless the wind is from the north. In which case you’ll want to be reading Christian Bok’s Eunoia or Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking beside the fireplace, in the wicker chair that sounds as if it will collapse every time it is used by anything heavier than a cushion.

This summer it’s been Richard Ford ( Canada) and Alexandra Fuller ( Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness). And this morning, as I head down the path toward a beloved old cottage, I realize that marble tables and Persian rugs don’t sound like much of a holiday to me. I know I’m on vacation when I can begin my day with a cup of coffee, the new translation of The Brothers Karamazov and a patch of sunlight somewhere out of the wind. davidmacfarlane.mail@gmail.com