The Guardian today asked some famous writers and poets to name their favourite summer holiday reading from the past. It was a lovely list, and the anecdotes really caught the best thing about summer reading - the incongruity between sun-kissed or rainy, grotty or exotic, setting, with the novel or book in question (Tolstoy, say, or Proust). I used to go away for a month or two every summer when I was a teenager, with my mother and brother, to a small log cottage on a private lake in northern Quebec; my father would drive up from Montreal on the weekends. The nearest town was a good hour walk. You reached the lake by driving half a mile down a dinky little pebble lane. Bears were in the woods; beavers slapped on the lake surface at twilight. The lake was a place of joy for me, prelapsarian, and I loved swimming for hours, and rowing and canoing. Also, building fires at night. But mostly, reading books. I would bring a box of maybe 40 books up with me for the 6 weeks, and polish them off.
They were an eclectic mix of Colin Wilson, Ngaio Marsh, Mimesis, and, most memorably, the most wonderful summer book, I Am Not Stiller, by Max Frisch. I had a deep woods crush at the time (I was 16) on a Hungarian-British girl from a posh part of Montreal I had met at a debating party, and we wrote letters to each other that summer. I can still recall how I trembled to kiss her. She had green eyes. I wrote her many poems. But mostly I read Frisch's deeply moving novel about denial and guilt and desire and identity. I wept when it was over. I have read other gripping books with joy and total immersion (The Idiot, Fear is The Key, The Secret History, most of Greene, The Road to Wigan Pier, The Good Soldier, A Month In the Country, Nemesis, poetry) but never again more so than then. Will I ever be so transported again? I always remain open to the chance I will be.
They were an eclectic mix of Colin Wilson, Ngaio Marsh, Mimesis, and, most memorably, the most wonderful summer book, I Am Not Stiller, by Max Frisch. I had a deep woods crush at the time (I was 16) on a Hungarian-British girl from a posh part of Montreal I had met at a debating party, and we wrote letters to each other that summer. I can still recall how I trembled to kiss her. She had green eyes. I wrote her many poems. But mostly I read Frisch's deeply moving novel about denial and guilt and desire and identity. I wept when it was over. I have read other gripping books with joy and total immersion (The Idiot, Fear is The Key, The Secret History, most of Greene, The Road to Wigan Pier, The Good Soldier, A Month In the Country, Nemesis, poetry) but never again more so than then. Will I ever be so transported again? I always remain open to the chance I will be.
Comments
So, 'beavers slapped on the lake surface at twilight'. I'm not surprised that you enjoyed yourself!
Best wishes from Simon