It’s the time of year
when celebrities of one kind or another are asked to tell us their Summer Reading
plans, providing them – if they choose - with opportunities to show themselves
in a good light and do favours for their friends. The latter is not always
acknowledged – though in today’s Financial
Times, I notice Philippe Sands prefacing a book choice with a “My friend …”
thus avoiding any risk of a later appearance in Private Eye’s end of year log-rolling awards, for which there are no
shortage of candidates among those who review and recommend books.
I had the thought that
the Summer Reading formula could be varied a bit. Instead of asking about
actual reading plans, I imagined this question:
If
you could only take on holiday this year a book which you read sometime last
year (2017), what would it be?
The question is a
challenge for me because I don’t go on holidays and don’t often read a book a
second time unless in connection with something I am writing. But I looked at
the books I reviewed here in 2017 and decided that if I had no choice this
summer but to re-read, I would pick:
Madeleine
Thien Do Not Say We Have Nothing,
reviewed here on 12 April 2017, which has an extraordinary layered complexity
which deserves a second reading.
And then, since that
book would take up a lot of my imaginary holiday, I would settle for a short
novel which I have already read twice and would have no trouble reading again:
Graham
Swift, Mothering Sunday,
reviewed here on 8 June 2017
But having re-written the summer reading picks question, it's now back to Freud.
