The best books for summer 2018, wherever and however you’re holidaying
Whether hitting the road, setting sail or lounging under the sun, match your reading material to your chosen break
Summer’s here and the time is right for reading on the beach, as legendary songwriter William “Mickey” Stevenson almost certainly didn’t say when penning Dancing in the Street. One of the joys of holidays is the prospect of free time to catch up with family, friends, hobbies and, of course, pleasure reading.
These days, the text itself could be on paper, a tablet or an iPhone, or even listened to via an audiobook. We can now pack an entire library into machines smaller than our passports. But does vast choice make the act of choosing a good holiday read any easier? You can fit 1,100 books on a 2GB Kindle, which means by the time you have finished scrolling through them, your week or even two-week holiday will be finished.
To help you weed out the Yan Liankes from the Jeffrey Archers, here are a few literary winners tailored for different vacation types. Reading novels and non-fiction can prepare you for taking a break almost as completely as a guidebook. I recall using Kinky Friedman’s funny crime novels to find offbeat restaurants in New York’s Greenwich Village, E.M. Forster’s Room with a View (1908) when visiting Florence, and even the most unsettling moments in Keigo Higashino’s crime novels did not dissuade me from considering a trip to Japan.
Of course, books can also pass the time, distracting weary parents from energetic children, and weary children from energetic parents. Reading is still one of the best ways to slow the tempo, get the mind working and the imagination imagining. Let books take the strain.
For travel’s sake
Travel, the practical business of getting from A to B, has its joys and its longueurs. Of course, it broadens the mind, but it can also drive you to distraction. New horizons, new people and new points of view, or long queues, out-of-date passports, cancelled flights and that oh-so-charming child kicking the back of your airline seat just as you are dozing off.
If Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) feels both old hat and slow, why not try Nellie Bly’s feminist classic Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890)? Having become a journalist after reading a newspaper column proclaiming that girls were good only for having babies and cleaning the house, Bly (real name Elizabeth Jane Cochrane) informed her editor at the New York World newspaper that she would not only realise Phileas Fogg’s imaginary journey, she would beat his time.