As a longtime Reader and Advisor (D.C. license pending), I have come up with a with a few guidelines for choosing your summer vacation books. You may want to clip this and tape it to the refrigerator.
1. You should always take more books than you can possibly get through. Who knows? It could rain every day at Ocean City, there might be a National Beer Alert (syringes? locusts? diseased hops?), you may discover that you can’t quite lose yourself in Gil Orlovitz’s Milkbottle H. A good rule of thumb is: Pack twice as many books as changes of underwear.
2. Make sure to bring something by a writer you know you like. If you’ve read, say, P.G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves and can say with confidence that you never had such a good time in your life – this is, by the way, the Correct Critical Response – you ought to lay in Uncle Fred in the Springtime or the complete Mulliner stories.
3. Make at least one of your books a classic you have always hoped to read. Odds are you’ll still be toting it along ten summers from now, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll open Middlemarch and be swept away. (Once again: CCR – Correct Critical Response.) Then this fall when you bump into George Will – a devotee of Eliot’s novel – you can say something like, “George, do you ever see yourself as Casaubon?” Be prepared to duck.
4. Include a good collection of poems. In lots of ways poetry makes ideal vacation reading: Unlike a novel or biography, you can actually finish a poem in a few minutes, then go out for a hike or a hamburger with something to think about. Moreover, poets are continually going on about nature, mountains, the sea, the search for love, the relentless passage of time; in short, the typical elements of a summer holiday. Who, before the Dewey Beach sirens and Rehoboth studs, would not sympathize with Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears,” especially the bit about kisses “sweet as those by hopeless fancy feighed / On lips that are for others”? Or, if spurned by a flaxen-haired, fail to find consolation in Yeat’s “Never shall a young man / Thrown into despair / By those great honey-colored / ramparts at your ear / Love you for yourself alone / and not your yellow hair”?
5. Take something Really Serious. As Lorelei Lee used to say, “Fun’s fun, but a girl can’t go on laughing all the time.” Suppose you’ve always like that observation by Heraclitus about a person not being able to step into the same river twice. Now is the time to learn more about the pre-Socratics and their thought. Buy the Penguin Early Greek Philosophy; add volumes 1 and 2 of W.K. Guthrie’s History of Greek Philosophy. Plan a little mini-seminar of one. When you get back to the office, you’ll dazzle your co-workers as you contrast Heraclitus with Parmenides – and later confess to your minister or rabbi that you’ve been converted to Pythagoreanism. Of course, low-level bureaucrats will find the slightly later philosophy of Epicurus more appealing: To be happy, one should choose an obscure life and try to avoid as much pain as possible.
6. Pack up some trash. After all, you are wallowing, aren’t you? Out there, in your tent or camper, a zillion miles from the cultural watchdogs, no one will know that you’re indulging in solitary vice, slobbering over John Grisham or Judith Krantz or the latest techno-porn. In fact, you should go all the way here, and make this session a real show: Knock off a six-pack, gobble M&M’s, scratch, belch, and worse. Get it all out of your system until next year. Then, purified of these shameful urges, you can go forth this fall to help make the bestseller list into something a tenured professor of English could be proud of. So what if it’s boring? Long live the Modern Library!
7. Buy the cheapest copies you can find of the books you want. Don’t take your signed first of Rober Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men anywhere that isn’t climate-controlled. Buy a paperback. Better yet: Buy a used paperback at a secondhand bookshop, or from the nearest Salvation Army or Goodwill. We’re talking expendable here, not collectable. Ideally, you should discard your books as you finish them: Agatha Christie’s Death in the Air should be left on the plane; The Portable Chekhov abandoned at the seaside resort (the page folded down at “The lady with the Dog”); Lolita tossed onto the unmade bed of a western motel.
Well, there you have them: Seven tips for holiday reading. Of course, I’ve left my most important recommendation for last. Never, ever take Remembrance of Things Past, War and Peace, or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on a summer vacation. At some point in life, you will be tempted into thinking that you might actually get through one of these monuments while swinging in a hammock or relaxing in a deck chair. Vanity of vanities! Upon these three rocks have foundered some of the best vacation readers of our time. As everyone should know, these books can be read only in late fall or early winter, when the days have grown short and our evenings are filled with firelight and melancholy.
Vacation reading
uit: Readings : essays and literary entertainments - Michael Dirda
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