E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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 mayb...

Is there anything better than sun?  Not the sun, mind, but sun, singular.  Sun.  As in getting, taking, catching.  Today was sunny in London.  Fully and completely sunny.  22 Celsius.  That is almost miraculous - a barbecue Spring moment of extreme grace.  I sat out in both the back and front of my flat, following sun.  I read some Hazlitt , on Familiar Style, the new Adrienne Rich , some Jessie L. Weston (she has a marvellous style!), and ended with some April poems from David Lehman 's delightful The Evening Sun .  I also read some newspapers, and other books, one on rhetoric, but leave that for another day.  I sometimes wore my UEA ballcap - but mostly I am red-faced for the seeking of the very highest good: sun.