Summer reading suitcases

If every book you took with you while travelling was enjoyable, you might accidentally read through them all - and be, once again, faced with the horrifying prospect of actually talking to your family

Once upon a time, there used to be a particular joy and terror associated with going on summer holidays. This had nothing to do with where you were going or what you planned to do; the fear and anticipation centred entirely around the process of packing. Packing for a trip, like policy-making, requires choices. Hard trade-offs. These have to be made with firmness, decision, and when in possession of all the facts. However, when it came to picking reading material for the trip, all these valuable qualities tended to vanish. 

There was only one real hazard to travel at that point. It wasn’t the roads, the delayed flights, or the hotels in the days before TripAdvisor when staying somewhere new was a leap of sublime faith. No, there were few things more terrifying than the possibility that you would find yourself in some rustic and pleasant resort — but having run through all you had brought to read. Two days left in paradise, but with nothing to read but the menu! What an abhorrent prospect. Perhaps there would be a second-hand bookshop in the quaint town to which you were bound? But even if so, would you not be thrown on the mercy of the literary tastes of whichever rustic traveller had passed through that town last? If he or she had decided to buy Stephen King at the airport then you, perforce, you would be held hostage to their choice. This was, to say the least, an unsatisfactory position in which to find oneself. 

Thus you over-packed with a will. Half your suitcase was books, as well as those three back issues of your favourite magazine you had been intending to read for months. There were multiple feats of optimisation to be performed. Yes, you might want to take the best possible, most engaging books with you on your rare vacation. But that would be a grave error. If every book you took with you was enjoyable, you might accidentally read through them all — and be, once again, faced with the horrifying prospect of actually, say, talking to your family and friends. Thus there needed to be at least one worthy, large tome which you could dip into regularly but which you simply couldn’t imagine actually finishing in the near or even medium term. For me, for years, this was Henry James’ The Ambassadors. There is a characteristically convoluted Jamesian sentence somewhere about a quarter of the way through that I swear I have read about three hundred times and fallen instantly asleep each time. 

You also needed to ensure that whatever you took was distinctly unappealing to everybody else on the trip with you. As infuriating as co-vacationers who constantly finish half the food you have lovingly ordered are those who wander into your room as you are unpacking and say, vaguely, “got anything to read?” At this point, it is crucial you produce from your capacious suitcase a series of books that they find distinctly unappetising, or they will say “Ah, that looks good” and then you’re down one book, with all your careful planning in a shambles reminiscent of India’s Third Five-Year Plan. At all costs avoid Agatha Christie or P G Wodehouse. Those will be snaffled faster than the good beach chairs, the ones in the shade. 

At least one book has to be one that you want to force yourself to read. This is to give your vacation an air of virtue. It may be work-related, though that tends to backfire – you may be forgiven for reading during a lovely sunset, but you would never be forgiven for “working” at that time. No, it had better be something vaguely improving, or perhaps a book written by a friend. The great advantage of taking it along on a trip is, of course, that there is a chance that it will get lost on the way back. 

The most difficult part of the optimisation is, of course, the prediction of whether something will in fact be worth finishing. Suppose the historical murder mystery you’ve taken along is completely predictable or, worse, filled has conversations littered with anachronistic slang? You had better have something else as a back-up. Other points of prediction are also complex. Once you are done with that big prize-winning literary three-generation post-colonial novel written by that obnoxious fellow who now has a column in some foreign newspaper, you’re bound to want a palate cleanser. But what? How can you know for sure before you’ve actually read that blasted thing, which is 1300 pages long excluding the 75 of its glossary? And once you have solved all these problems there is the additional minor question of whether there is space in your luggage for clothes.

Those were the days, I say. Panic and eagerness in equal measure. These days, of course, one just takes one’s Kindle along. I haven’t needed to pay for extra luggage in years. Still, I can’t help that leaving home lacks a certain excitement in consequence.