holiday books

Have you noticed that books are like buses, or like lovers - none come along for ages that you really want to read, then there'll be a plethora of them? It's ages since I've read a book which really gripped me; and we're off to Madeira for a week, with nothing much to do except eat, drink, sleep and read. (When I told my ex-mother in law where we were going, she said, 'You're going with Vera?' She's very deaf, but refuses to believe she is.)

Anyway, books... I've saved up a lengthy thriller, The Dante Club, recommended by Sean, who is himself writing a thriller. The title's quite eye-catching, and it sounds as if it should be literate. I'm 50 pages into A.D.Nuttall's Shakespeare's Thought. I love reading about Shakespeare, and I can recommend 1599, about one important year of his life (I forget the author); it's a book that really brings one closer to the enigmatic person of Shakespeare and to his inner creative life. But the Nuttall one is a hard nut to crack. And it's heavy, literally; I don't want my suitcase to be overweight, because I want to bring back lots of cigarettes... So I may leave it till we're back before I think some more about Shakespeare's thought.

I popped into the local Oxfam yesterday to see if I could find something else. For a nanosecond I toyed with the idea of buying Racine in French, or W.E.Gladstone's Victorian versions of the poet Horace; but I settled on a potboiler called 100 Serial Killers. I felt embarrassed showing it to the little white-haired old lady at the till. But a thriller and a lightweight study of serial killers isn't going to see me through a week with Vera --sorry, in Madeira. And what if I'm bored with the thriller within 30 pages? I might take Goncharov's great comic novel Oblomov to re-read in case I'm stuck. It's long, long, long, but a paperback. The truth is, I'm still waiting for the next queue of books that I feel desperate to read. They often come along when I only want to write, not read. Life's like that.