Sarah Crown 

Big up your shelf

When it comes to the advent of the summer, the definitive modern signifier must surely be the annual appearance of a rash of summer reading lists.
  
  



Holiday readers at Hay ... does one of these learned types have a Dan Brown tucked inside their copy of Proust? Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Factor 15, antihistamines and tables outside pubs? Forget about it. When it comes to the advent of the summer, the definitive modern signifier must surely be the annual appearance of a rash of summer reading lists.

Publishing powerhouses Richard and Judy unveiled their list of summer reads yesterday (this year's titles range from Jim Lynch's tale of giant squids and adolescence, The Highest Tide, to The Island, a love story set on Crete by wife-of-Ian, Victoria Hislop). The Guardian, meanwhile, led the newspaper charge last weekend, with a lengthy list of authors' and critics' beach book recommendations.

For me, one of the annual delights of the summer reading lists is the spectacle of the great and good of the books world indulging in an unseemly bout of literary one-upmanship, with the battle on to come up with more and still more worthily abstruse submissions. Unpicking the semantics of these lists is a fascinating exercise. Essays and poetry rank above non-fiction; non-fiction trumps novels. Novels, if they are to be recommended at all, should be either a) little-known works by classic authors (vis AS Byatt's nifty avoidance of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier in favour of his lesser-known and therefore higher-scoring No More Parades), b) in translation (Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise is proving extremely popular this year), or c) in with a shot at this year's Booker (Sarah Waters' The Night Watch and Edward St Aubyn's sublime Mother's Milk both receive several mentions).

Most of the authors who are invited to contribute to these lists have a reasonable command of the rules. For a truly breathtaking example of how the game should be played, however, look no further than this year's list from Alain de Botton, who hits it out of the park in the very first sentence with the claim that he is "looking forward to reading Gabriel Josipovici's new collection of essays The Singer on the Shore". Essays: tick. Little-known (but highly respected) author: tick. Foreign (Josipovici was born in Nice): tick.

He then consolidates his position with mention of a Booker-candidate (Edward St Aubyn) and two non-fiction works: Tim Hartford's The Undercover Economist (which "will hopefully correct my fear and ignorance of his topic once and for all"), and the almost pathologically esoteric Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed the World. Schooled in language and philosophy as de Botton is, his acute grasp of the rules of the summer reading list is unsurprising. In fact, his recommendations are almost too perfect: he comes perilously close to looking - dare we suggest it? - just a trifle pretentious.

Kudos, therefore, to Ian Rankin for breaking with tradition. "I've just got hold of Jilly Cooper's latest novel, Wicked," he gushes in the Review, "and will try to abstain from dipping into it until the summer hols ... Fat as a goose, the book should see me through a fortnight. If it doesn't, I'll turn to Elmore Leonard's Complete Western Stories. I'm a huge fan of his crime fiction, but he started out writing for cowboy magazines, and I look forward to tipping my stetson in the direction of this generous volume." Jilly Cooper and genre fiction? At last: holiday reading recommendations that bear some resemblance to what will actually be lying beside our sunloungers this summer.

There's nothing wrong with adding the odd aesthetic embellishment to one's reading list, of course, and for all I know, Alain de Botton is sitting by a pool right now, mugging up on the history of container ships. But it's difficult not to suspect that the lists authors and critics offer us during the summer months have been carefully constructed to subtly convey an idealised picture of the recommender's rarefied reading habits. So my question to you is this. Are these literati the only people open to the accusation of massaging their reading lists, or do we all do it? Is there a gulf between the books that you tell people you'll be taking on holiday and the ones that you'll actually end up reading?

 

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