Apparently, it’s de rigueur for everyone to list their summer reading. Politicians, all the way from Obama to our local varieties, are spending their summers indulging in politico-inspirational memoirs. Or so we’re told. So allow me to roll out my own, vastly more humble, summer holiday reading list.
First off, picture this scenario. I’m reading a thriller about multiple simultaneous unexplained plane crashes, with over a 1,000 casualties. I’m reading it while on a plane journey. And feel zero anxiety. That’s how bad The Three, by Sarah Lotz is.
In a nutshell, the story is about four plane crashes in which there are no survivors except for three children who miraculously escape unscathed. A mysterious mobile phone message also survives, giving rise to a doomsday cult. Hints of the supernatural follow, with generous sprinklings of horror clichés and pages upon pages of sheer boredom. All of this wrapped in utterly forgettable writing and even more forgettable characters.
The big question is: why did Stephen King agree to give the book a cover quote, calling it “hard to put down and vastly entertaining”. Perhaps King subscribes to the point of view that you praise that which is so vastly inferior as to be of no threat whatsoever?
Truth is, all of my usual book-decoding signals were telling me I wouldn’t like it – from the choice of endorsements (yes, including King) to the short extract I’d read. But the book cover kept calling me to it. The UK edition cover had something that kept making me go back to it. Until I gave in.
In the industry, we call it ‘grabability’ – that something about a great book cover that makes you want to grab the book off the shelf and read it. The concept of grabability is as elusive as it is powerful and irresistible. Superficial as this makes me, I confess to making a lot of my reading choices based on the cover.
Case in point: one of the books I’m most intrigued by, of the latest crop of Man Booker Prize longlist, is Did You Ever Have a Family, by literary agent-turned-writer Bill Clegg. The blurb reads like the book would be up my street; the reviews are mostly glowing.
And yet. The horrible ‘1980s school reader’ cover is stopping me from buying the book. I can’t get past it. I’ll probably wait for the paperback edition and the (usually more attuned to customer interest) different book cover that will bring. Silly, I know, but there you go.
Books can affect my holiday, in that a succession of bad reads can slightly dampen even the most successful of trips
Another cover off-road accident during my holiday reading: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer. The cover screamed “read me”. Though truth be told, the gushing praise it received didn’t hurt either: “Genius techno-thriller”; “hilarious, moving and wildly ambitious”; “outlandishly clever”; “a Graham Greene novel written by Edward Snowden. The Anonymous novel I have been waiting for”.
It was probably a case of overpromise, underperform. Too reminiscent of Dave Eggers’s The Circle, but without the latter’s tongue-in-cheek. I kept looking for the stroke of genius that would make it innovative, but didn’t find it.
It’s not a bad read, by all means, but a very run-of-the-mill social-media-paranoia novel, of which there are way too many to allow for an ounce of originality.
It wasn’t all bad, though. I did have some excellent holiday reads. Two authors I work with, whose reading recommendations I value, are aficionados of Paul Auster and China Miéville, so when I ran out of reading material and walked into a foreign bookshop, I picked up one of each.
The Paul Auster was Sunset Park, which I thoroughly recommend. Partly set in the publishing world – a shot of self-referentialism never did anyone any harm – it accompanied me through a few good evenings.
The Miéville was The City and the City. Miéville can get weird, fast, for middlebrows like me. But The City and the City is a great read, by all accounts, and a good introduction to Miéville if you haven’t read him yet. Two separate and incommunicable cities sharing the same geographical space, but with vigorously enforced laws in each city, against even acknowledging the other city, it is a topographical conceit that most authors would have stumbled on. But Miéville makes it work brilliantly. Read it.
Another book I’d been saving for my holiday was The Way Inn by Will Wiles. A couple of years back Wiles debuted with the wildly entertaining Care of Wooden Floors – a laugh-out-loud read I discovered while randomly browsing (and, once again, intrigued by an intelligent cover).
Set in an unnamed, central European capital, it was a farcical descent into tragedy of a guy tasked with house-sitting an apartment and its precious immaculate wooden flooring.
This year, Wiles followed up his debut with The Way Inn, about a businessman who practically lives his life in hotel rooms and loves it, relishing the comfort of the identical rooms in the various outposts of his favourite hotel chain.
Midway, though, the novel seems to change tack and what started off as a comedy of errors of sorts, turns into a gothic horror story. Conservative reader that I am, I didn’t care much for this swerving – especially as I was quite enjoying the direction of the first half, thank you very much. Sadly, it’s probably put me off reading the next Wiles.
Books can affect my holiday, I find, in that a succession of bad reads can slightly dampen even the most successful of trips. So I was glad to have picked as my on-my-way-back-home read The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett.
Now, many of you will turn up their noses, because everything about it screams soppy and the packaging of the book will do nothing for the book snobs out there. But for an end-of-trip read, it’s hugely enjoyable.
Think Sliding Doors or, even better, David Nicholls’s One Day. Or Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. You get the gist: the novel gives us three alternative versions of the life of Eva and Jim, depending on whether or not they’d had their fateful first encounter in Cambridge as students. It’s written really well, which elevates it from summer-fling-read to something better.
And, keeping up with all the permutations of their lives will have you flicking the pages to and fro repeatedly. Which, incidentally, makes it one book where I’d definitely recommend you read the print and not the e-version.