Summer reading: how to pick the right book for any trip

A Room With a View might be perfect for a Tuscan villa, but what should you read at the Burning Man festival or while cooped up with the kids in a West Country cottage? Six leading writers select the best books to take with you – whatever type of holiday you're going on .

Reading is traditionally an indoor activity: think of Jane Eyre snuggled up on the window seat at Gateshead Hall, dreaming over Bewick’s Birds , or David Copperfield sitting on his bed and ‘reading as if for life’. But there are people who love reading outside. When the satanist, poet and self-proclaimed sex-addict Aleister Crowley set out in 1902 to climb K2, he insisted on lugging with him the complete works of Milton, Shelley and Wordsworth, arguing that ‘the almost universal mental and moral instability of Europeans engaged in exploring’ was due to ‘the lack of proper intellectual relaxation rather than to any irritations and hardships’.

In 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, and he packed in his knapsack The Oxford Book of English Verse and the first volume of the Loeb Horace . There’s also a venerable tradition of wayfaring songs and stories ( The Canterbury Tales , for instance) which I guess constitutes a kind of outdoors reading.

I like reading outside, not least because books tend to get marked – by raindrops, mud smears, trapped sand grains, pressed flowers – in ways you remember if you return to them months or years later.

It’s not always a happy recollection. I’ve got a bashed-up hardback copy of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (Penguin) which weighs just over 3lb and which I hauled up a Himalayan mountain, hoping that Cherry-Garrard’s quiet heroism would be an inspiration. But by the time I needed the inspiration, I was too ill from altitude to be able to read, and beyond Apsley’s help.

What books go well with what landscapes? For riverbank and lakeside holidays, there’s Norman Maclean’s masterpiece A River Runs Through It (Chicago Univeristy Press), a novel which is about trout fishing only in the sense that Moby-Dick is about whaling.

If you’re off to stay in or near a wood or forest, such places come alive in Roger Deakin’s recent Wildwood (Penguin) and in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (Minerva). If you’re away wild camping, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (kept admirably in print by Canongate Classics) might remind you of why canvas is worth it. Shepherd writes exquisitely of sleeping out: the nightly opera of the moon and stars and the power of darkness to make even familiar places excitingly strange. Dawn and dusk, she also notes, are often the times at which landscapes are most subtle and most surprising, in their modalities of light and in the boldness of birds and animals.

For walking or trekking holidays, Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (John Murray), an account of his trans-European walk, is the perfect vade mecum, alternating as it does between the stories and visions of each day’s effort and the warmth and hospitality of each night’s shelter. I reread it last December, mostly by firelight or torchlight, while walking in the Minya Konka region of the eastern Himalayas (near the Sichuan/Tibetan border), along with the Selected Essays of Wendell Berry (Golgonooza Press), the American farmer and philosopher who writes brilliantly about the experience of being in a canoe on a rising river or finding an old path in a wooded valley.

VS Pritchett remarks at the start of Marching Spain (1928) that he never bothers to pack a book he wants to read when walking, on the grounds that he had ‘long lost all my sentimental illusions about the joys of the open road with a “beloved classic” in one’s pocket’. I’m off on a three-day wander down the East Anglian coast in August. The plan is to pack Marching Spain (Hogarth Press) and see if I get round to reading it.

· Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places is published by Granta

Time to be a treasure hunter

The country cottage
By Tessa Hadley

The idea of a crowd of family or friends cooped up together for weeks in a cottage in the country feels like a short story even before anything begins to happen: everyone translated out of their ordinary lives, with all those long hours to fill. (Whether the story is a comedy or a dark parable depends on who’s writing it.) It’s bound to rain and the books you find on the shelves in the cottage will be a doomed miscellany, tainted with rejection, pages swollen with damp, so it’s a good idea to take something with you, big enough to get lost inside.

Last summer, I reread Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (Penguin), drawn deep into his picture of the political life of those old Italian city states, comical and personal, arbitrary, everything on a human scale. It was years since I’d read the novel; I had just about remembered Waterloo, the prison and the duchess in love with her young nephew in her middle age, but most of the story that wound them together had faded, so it was almost like finding it for the first time. You can’t hold most of what’s inside the covers of a novel in your memory for very long after you’ve finished reading: that isn’t accidental or a weakness – it’s intrinsic to the novel form and means pleasure can be renewed over and over. Last time I read Emma, I discovered that when Harriet stayed with the Martins, they had their little shepherd boy in to sing to them in the evenings; I’m sure that had never been in the book before.

Books read differently on a country holiday; they are more overwhelming, as if they grow to fill the different, emptier air and the lazy living. It’s tempting when you’re packing up in the city to put in a ridiculous quantity to read, convinced that at last in the country there will be the long, empty hours to do justice to all the books waiting their turn in piles on your floor. Once you’re down there, you’ll have to make a ritual visit to the secondhand bookshop in a nearby town, where you will find treasures – it’s still more satisfying than finding them on AbeBooks – and then there’ll be new floor-piles. (You can exult at your treasures over cream tea afterwards.)

Once, we found Tibor Dery’s Niki: The Story of a Dog (Penguin), a tender allegory of the years of postwar repression in Hungary. In the front was written ‘Happy Christmas Peter darling, love from Mummy and Daddy’; we hoped Peter was a sombre child, prepared for bleak initiations (the dog dies).

In a country cottage, you probably won’t want to read about people cooped up in cottages. It’s good to counteract all the seductions of lush nature and noisy, sociable shared meals with something bracing. One of my sons lent me Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (Atlantic) by political theorist John Dunn. This is exhilarating and terrifying; it made me see the casual assumptions of our way of politics in a perspective as long and cold as if I was watching from the moon.

My reading swoops between the long shot of abstract ideas and the novel’s close-up. I have Janet Davey’s latest, The Taxi Queue (Vintage), saved up to take down to the cottage this summer. I love her subtle, unexpected sentences. And although her novels are thick with particular right detail – never abstract – there’s something of the moon about her writing too, a cool blue light.

· Tessa Hadley’s Sunstroke and Other Stories is published by Vintage

Psychedelia and marshmallows

The festival goer
By Geoff Dyer

What a relief not to be going to Burning Man this summer! To be free of all the planning, schlepping, self-reliance, drugs and dust! Going back year after year was like having a timeshare on a non-existent chalet in the Nevada desert. Relief, of course, does not preclude a swelling sense of elegy, as Byron movingly foresaw: ‘So we’ll go no more a-raving/ So late into the night,/ Though the heart be still as loved-up,/ And the full moon still as bright.’

The strangest thing about Burning Man – or any other festival – is that, in spite of all the things they could be doing, some weirdos still have the time and inclination to read there. How crazy is that? So what should the serious-minded festival goer be seen to be reading this year?

Theoretical sustenance comes with Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z. (Autonomedia), a visionary manifesto for the festival as a kind of pilgrimage site. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, says Bey, ‘is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area [of land, of time, of imagination] and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere/elsewhen, before the state can crush it.’ (Subject, he might have added, to councils granting licences.)

Deep historical context is provided by Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Granta), which also explains why sitting on your boyfriend’s shoulders and gazing adoringly at Phil Collins at Glasto – I’m a little out of touch with the music scene – is not the same as being overcome with Fuhrer adoration at a Nuremberg rally. Ehrenreich barely mentions Burning Man – fair enough, she starts way back with the Greek cult of Dionysus – but Daniel Pinchbeck devotes a key chapter to it in his Breaking Open the Head (Flamingo), subtitled in one edition, accurately and grandly, A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism . That’s right, he takes all these scary drugs – iboga, DMT, ayahuasca – in snakey places (Gabon, the Amazon) so you don’t have to. By the end of it all, either he’s gone a little nuts or, as he sees it, the rest of us must be nuts not to spend our time communicating with alien intelligence and machine elves via the DMT hotline (weekend calls are free, terms and conditions apply).

Pinchbeck’s emphasis on the journey is entirely appropriate. Although it happens in a specific place, a festival offers the opportunity to be transported. Appropriate fiction embraces some kind of spiritual odyssey or self-transforming search. John Haskell’s American Purgatorio (Canongate) is one of the best novels of the last five years, a hilarious, profoundly moving road trip that culminates, heartbreakingly, with a marshmallow being roasted on a stick. It is nicely complemented by AM Homes’s This Book Will Save Your Life (Granta), another parable – starting where Haskell’s ends up, in California – of our time. As both these books were published only a couple of years ago they make Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight (Pushkin Press), first published in Hungarian in 1937, even more astonishing. Dude, that’s like, hang on… that’s 70 years ago! It starts with a honeymoon in Venice and then goes… everywhere. Wherever you get to this summer you will never wind up anywhere as far out as Szerb’s delirious narrative: ‘We carry within ourselves the direction our lives will take. Within ourselves burn the timeless, fateful stars.’

· Geoff Dyer is the author of Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (Abacus)

Travels with Henry, Hector and Hazlitt

The cultural flaneur
By James Fenton

EM Forster used to mock the British tourists solemnly doing the rounds of Florence with their noses in Ruskin. It is years since I have seen a copy of Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence (Echo Library), let alone read one, but I remember very vividly its authoritarian tone: one was instructed to look at such a carving and then look at nothing else until one arrived at Ruskin’s point of comparison. I tried doing this, and following Ruskin’s walks, but Florence had changed since his day and some of the key frescoes Ruskin mentioned were no longer remotely legible.

Some writers have set their mark upon the great cities, but whether most people would really want to wander round Rome with a copy of Livy in their back pocket I rather doubt. (Tacitus is another matter.) That kind of holiday resolution which says: ‘I have so many days in hand and this time I shall finally conquer Gibbon’ sounds more like a vow for a sedentary retreat.

And an admirable vow, too, but as a sightseeing tourist, I would want a short book rather than a megalith. If I were walking around Rome and needing something to slip in my pocket to read over lunch, it would be more likely to be Henry James – perhaps Daisy Miller (Penguin). In Venice, it might be James’s Letters from Palazzo Barbaro in that truly pocketable volume from the Pushkin Press. But there must be other writers than James for the cultural wanderer or flaneur.

As Edmund White notes in his little book about Paris, The Flaneur (Bloomsbury), flanerie is supposed to be purposeless – no good for Americans, who ‘are always driven by the urge towards self-improvement’. In White’s estimation, Americans are better ‘at following books outlining architectural tours of Montparnasse’ – rather like those high-minded British tourist in Florence.

For those who prefer cities to reveal their treasures more haphazardly, here are three resonant masterpieces, the perfect companions for a loose-limbed stroll. The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (Everyman) ranges over large parts of Europe and is about artistic aspiration in general, not just the agonies of being a musician. Next, a book that Berlioz loved enough to make an opera out of it, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (Penguin): for a long time, people assumed that a story so engagingly told must be a pack of lies, but where it can be checked it seems largely to be true. And, for the 20th-century artist’s life (and the incomparable wealth of gossip they contain), any of the three volumes of John Richardson’s Picasso (Cape).

‘The rule for travelling abroad is to take our common sense with us and leave our prejudices behind us,’ says Hazlitt at the start of his Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy : ‘The object of travelling is to see and learn… let us think what we please of what we really find, but prejudge nothing.’ There’s a philosophy and there’s a rare book for a summer afternoon.

· James Fenton is editor of The New Faber Book of Love Poems

Chilling out with Charles Bukowski and Lord Jim

The backpacker
By William Sutcliffe

Looking back on all the times I went backpacking, and all the hours I spent agonising about what I should cram into my pack, I now realise that my clothes were usually ditched in favour of ethno-tat, my toiletries usually got lost and my medical kit was never opened. Only one thing really mattered: my choice of books.

No other activity can approach backpacking for the amount of time spent waiting: for trains to arrive, for buses to leave, for broken-down buses to be mended, all in order to get to some remote spot where you can ‘chill out’ (i.e. wait). In these circumstances, your choice of reading matter is extremely important. Without a good book, backpacking can resemble an obscure punishment.

Novels are the hard currency of a book-bartering economy that thrives in backpackers’ hostels all over the world. The books you take have to be not just good, but swappable. The first thing to be aware of is that there is a Backpacker Canon, which is rigid and unchanging. These books have been read by every generation of backpackers since the Sixties and are, for no apparent reason, compulsory.

The chief pillars of the canon are Catch-22, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, On the Road and Steppenwolf. These books all fulfil the criterion of changing the way you see the world, often for up to a fortnight. One of these four titles is an obligatory accessory for any self-respecting backpacker.

The value of a book in the backpacker barter economy has nothing to do with its cover price. The gold standard of swappability is set by classics of the late 20th century set in backpacker-friendly countries: say, Midnight’s Children and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Shortly behind this come novels either about drugs, or by authors who are known to have taken drugs, or which make no less sense when the reader is on drugs. Favourites authors in this category are Hunter S Thompson, Carlos Castaneda, Will Self, Irvine Welsh and Charles Bukowski.

It is a mistake to think you have to read about the country you are visiting. Backpackers spend much of their time complaining about the place they have chosen to visit. The job of your reading matter is often to take you away from where you are. I once spent three days on a bus crossing the Gobi desert and, frankly, I needed a book about something other than sand. I read Lord Jim and The World According to Garp and the two books are forever curiously miscegenated in my head. Because of the movie, Robin Williams is somehow in the mix, too. I feel almost as if Williams, Joseph Conrad, John Irving and I spent three days together hanging out on a bus in the desert, with me as host, proud to have introduced them to one another. I hope they keep in touch.

You will never have more time to read than when you are backpacking – until you retire – so if you have any sense, you will use it as an opportunity to read books a little longer and more challenging than you are likely to pick up when earning a living intrudes. No trip will ever be entirely wonderful or relentlessly terrible, but if you get back home having read Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, A Suitable Boy, Earthly Powers and Underworld, or even just a couple of those, your journey will have been worthwhile. You will have travelled the world in your mind, regardless of where you have been.

· William Sutcliffe’s latest novel, Whatever Makes You Happy, is published by Bloomsbury, £10.99

The joy of curling up with Casanova

The Tuscan villa
By Esther Freud

Good books, read on holiday in long, daytime stretches, are the ones that often linger most powerfully in one’s memory. I will always associate Anna Karenina and the tear-stained pages of my paperback with the white sand of Formentera, as I lay on a beach, forgetting the troubles that had led me there and losing myself in Anna’s infinitely greater sorrows.

But when I last visited Italy, and was lucky enough to stay in a Tuscan villa, I was researching my novel and didn’t dare risk reading any other fiction set there. Instead, I packed The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones (Faber), described by one of Berlusconi’s ministers as: ‘a mixture of bigotry and Marxism. Worthy of a country where there’s still a branch of the parliament where men wear wigs.’

I also took La Terra in Piazza by Alan Dundes and Alessandro Falassi, a book about the Palio – the annual horse race that takes place in Siena – and so dazzlingly passionate about its subject that I had to attend the race myself.

But these are both books for flipping through in the cool interiors of luxurious bedrooms, and by the pool I would ideally turn to Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Bloomsbury), where she describes how by learning ‘the most seductively beautiful language in the world’ and attempting to track down the country’s best pizza, she rid herself of her depression and gained so much weight she kept the last pair of trousers she bought there as a souvenir.

The final story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (Bloomsbury) is set in Italy, and she uses the beauty of the scenery and the sensuousness of the food to lull you into delusions of romance before breaking not just her character’s heart, but yours too.

I’d love to lie in the shade and read A Room With a View by EM Forster (Penguin) and reclaim my images from that witty, philosophical novel, since usurped by the gorgeous Merchant Ivory film. If there were many other guests, and the possibility of intrigue, then Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love (Penguin) and Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (Vintage) are ideal for the romance, the multitude of characters and the reminder that you might be in a large house, but not in a damp, draughty British one.

If you like thrillers, there’s Niccolò Ammaniti’s I’m Not Scared (Canongate), a petrifying novel based on the kidnap in 1978 of a young boy from Milan and the child who befriends and attempts to free him. Just as good may be Elizabeth von Arnim’s Enchanted April (Virago), or the lives of Dante, or Casanova. But whatever you take it’s important not to risk book envy. I once spent a long weekend beside a pool reading Sebastian Faulks’s devastating, claustrophobic Birdsong (Vintage) while my husband devoured What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe (Penguin), choking with hilarity at almost every page.

· Esther Freud’s Love Falls is out now in paperback (Bloomsbury)

Top five classic airport novels

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy (1984)

Cold War thriller much loved by Ronald Reagan, this was the first novel to be published by the US Naval Institute.

Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins (1983)

Sex, scandal and lashings of Hollywood gossip, interspersed with envy-inducing shopping sprees on Rodeo Drive.

Lace by Shirley Conran (1982)

One of the pearls of this gloriously tacky tale of a movie star’s search for her roots is the infamous line: ‘Which one of you bitches is my mother?’

Riders by Jilly Cooper (1985)

Show-jumping hero Rupert Campbell-Black set a generation of schoolgirl hearts aflame in vintage Cooper romp.

The Firm by John Grisham (1991) Rattling account of the shady goings-on at a Memphis law firm that sealed Grisham’s reputation. Might well put you off scuba-diving.

Top five summer reads of 2008

The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer (Faber)

The appearance of a stranger on her doorstep throws a dutiful wife’s world off-balance.

Sashenka by Simon Montefiore (Bantam)

Sweeping historical epic about a daring young woman forced to make a hard choice in Stalinist Russia.

The Good Plain Cook by Bethan Roberts (Serpent’s Tail)

In the summer of 1936 a girl in rural Sussex answers an advert that leads her to an extraordinary household.

The Standing Pool by Adam Thorpe (Cape)

An idyllic French holiday turns into anything but for an English family.

Crime by Irvine Welsh (Cape)

An Edinburgh detective on holiday in Florida stumbles into a sinister world of professional paedophiles.