The Cattery

The Cattery

Reading Matter

23 August 2005
Filed under Books, Text, Travel

Every book you take on holiday adds virtually nothing to the initial weight of your luggage, but grows in mass according to the following formula:
y = z(yx)
where x = number of days of holiday, y = weight of book and z = the number of months you've previously avoided reading the book.

(There's also a formula for determining how likely you are to be struggling through A Suitable Boy while on holiday in the sub-continent, and another for determining how many pages longer it mysteriously gets with every day that you stare balefully at the portion you haven't read yet, but that's for another time).

Anyway, all this is by way of saying that choosing your holiday reading matter isn't a task to be taken lightly. Books carried that remain unread acquire a status of resented-ness that can never be erased; they will remain unread forever (books recommended by others frequently fall into this category). Fat, aeroplane novels devoured in four hours can be deeply worthwhile, but only if you're the type of person who can abandon a book en route. Slim hardbacks with big writing are a gamble: the affected and substanceless novella of a literary darling will leave you seething with irritation, because only the worst type of human can discard a hardback, but you might get lucky and happen upon a gem like Michael Chabon's The Final Solution, which can be read and then re-read a week later, before being lovingly wrapped in the fleecy hoodie you thought you might need, for some insane reason, in a country in which the temperature never drop below 20 degrees celsius.

My reading list for this trip consisted of:

I augmented this with the two most recent editions of The New Yorker, a Vanity Fair and a hat-tip to my own nerdery: Digital Photography Hacks, from the O'Reilly Hacks series.

I think my selection was pretty much as good as it could have been. The Closers eased me into holiday mode perfectly (it's now living in the library at the Yala Village Safari Park) and A Long Way Down was there to jump-start my brain again when I was in danger of slipping into heat-induced mental incapacity. The Michael Chabon disappeared in moments, but left a holiday-long impression. Dead Europe, which deals with the spectre of anti-semitism and culminates in a kind of literal exorcism, follows the narrator's travels through the Europe of his family history, and it's beautifully, movingly told.

Upon turning the last page of Dead Europe, a scant two-and-a-half weeks into my trip, I realised with alarm that I had nothing left to read. I trod water for a couple of days with The New Yorker, and started - heartbreakingly, because it belonged to the hotel and I knew I wouldn't finish it before leaving - Philip Pullman's The Northern Lights, which I'll certainly pick up when I get back to Melbourne. I also began the redesign of this site, which absorbed some of my usual reading hours.

Then, in the salt-grimy library of the Sun House in Galle, I found and inhaled Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, a portrait of his family's life in Sri Lanka. It's probably worth coming to Sri Lanka just to read this book in its native environment - it's stunning, and certainly the best literary non-fiction novel I've read.

In a hotel bookshop I picked up In the Skin of a Lion, a more recent Ondaatje, which, while beautifully written and somewhat shocking, didn't leave quite the impression that Running in the Family did. Perhaps I'll re-read it when I travel back in time to 20th century Toronto.

Finally, on my second-last day in Colombo, I bought Orwell's Burmese Days, which I'm still enjoying. On the way home, our combined luggage tipped the scales at 78kgs; only a bit of subtle balancing at the check-in counter allowed us to avoid hefty excess baggage fines.

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