There’s a very precise art to chosing holiday reading
Philip Blackwell, of the bookselling Blackwell family, is seeking a manager for a new bookshop, located not in some agreeable university city or modish corner of literary London, but on the Maldivian island resort of Soneva Fushi. During a stint of at least three months, the successful candidate will be expected to “entertain children with storytelling and host creative writing courses for guests” as well as writing a “lively blog that captures the exhausting life of a desert island bookseller”. The pay is “derisory” but the fringe benefits “unparalleled”.
In noticing that “the Maldives is not overendowed with bookshops,” Blackwell has hit upon something that almost all resorts, however lavishly equipped with personal butlers, white coral beaches and tree-top yoga classes, mysteriously ignore.
For many of us, reading is an indispensable element of a holiday – along with lurid cocktails and preposterous beachwear. Each summer the holiday reading juggernaut lurches into action: publishers usher the latest batch of foil-bedizened thrillers and chick-lit onto the airport book stalls; newspapers publish the summer reading recommendations of assorted cultural celebrities, who say things like: “It faithfully enacts Kafka’s truism that a book must be an axe that shatters the frozen seas inside us.”
But when you actually arrive at your destination, you can bet your Versace tankini that the “library” mentioned on the fancy hotel website will be a meagre shelf on which lurk two copies of The Da Vinci Code in Dutch translation, a large print edition of Catherine Cookson’s Katie Mulholland, a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in the original Swedish, and a dog-eared paperback of Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
Since childhood I have suffered from a fear of running out of things to read, which turns to terror each time I go on holiday. Twice it has been a closerun thing. In Lisbon one New Year’s Eve, a lastminute dash to an Englishlanguage bookshop produced the Penguin Classic edition of Lorna Doone, a book I have regarded with keen dislike ever since. A year ago, in Reykjavik, a similar crisis had a happier outcome: a marked-down copy of Apollo’s Angels, a history of ballet by Jennifer Homans, which had the twin virtues of being extremely good and immensely long.
The precise qualities of holiday reading are hard to define: too slight, and the book is finished before you get off the plane. Too worthy, and the contrast between the heaviness of the text and the lightness of your surroundings becomes intolerable. During a long convalescence in the chilly spring of this year, I read my way straight through Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire and Palliser chronicles, and it strikes me that convalescent and holiday reading have this in common, that both the heart and the mind need to be engaged.
What, then, to pack for an imminent road trip to California? The editor of these pages recommends books with a connection with one’s destination, so the Everyman edition of Joan Didion’s collected non-fiction, which runs to more than 1,000 pages, should keep me going. As an antidote to all that stylish West Coast neurosis, perhaps Henry James, whose elegant fictional circumlocutions I have resisted until now. If they prove to be the axe that shatters the frozen seas within, I’ll let you know.