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Books you can’t see miss the point of holiday reading. You want something that’s a conversation starter

Conversation starter: This summer’s talking point is still Capital by Thomas Piketty

Updated: 11:59, 25 July 2014

It’s rough luck on the Tuscan holiday set, isn’t it, that Donna Tartt hasn’t made it to the Man Booker longlist. It would have been so handy: a page-turner, only with the imprimatur of the Booker judges. (Though, as this paper’s literary editor, David Sexton, pointed out, any panel headed by the philosopher AC Grayling isn’t one you can take entirely seriously anyway.)

That’s the challenge about taking books on holiday. There are the ones you want to read and there are the ones you want to be seen reading — the Booker candidates, for instance. They’re not always the same, oh no. The Goldfinch is, by all accounts, rather compelling, but it’s not one to show off with. The nearest thing to a nice easy read in the longlist is probably David Nicholls’s Us — a romcom which most people won’t find unduly taxing on a hot day.

It’s a fun seasonal game, the business of holiday reading. In theory, the difficulties of choosing something good enough to keep you going but sufficiently respectable to talk about should have been abolished by Kindle, a device which means you can read what you like — filth, pulp, devotional literature — without anyone being the wiser.

But books you can’t see miss the point of holiday reading. You want something that’s a conversation starter with other people, preferably something they’ve heard about, or that they fancy reading themselves and can steal after you’ve finished it. You can’t do that with a flat screen. And I’m talking just recreational reading — once upon a time, people would arrange reading holidays on which you didn’t do much else.

Ideally, the answer is to have a mix of books — at least three — on the go. (One former editor of this paper, Stewart Steven, had an entire trunk constructed for his holiday library.) You want something decent and solid, to catch up on the reading you ought to have done already.

This summer’s talking point is still Capital by Thomas Piketty, more bought than read — though it’s worth sticking in the back the demolition of his data by the FT’s Chris Giles. That’s a conversation starter, depending on who you go on holiday with.

Or there’s the new batch of First World War histories, though it’s a bit worrying that so many are written by Englishmen who can’t read German. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August is the classic here.

Then there are the books you want to read, something to keep you going in departure lounges. Something light but not rubbish. Spoiled Brats, a comic novel by the precocious Simon Rich, is one of those books funny enough to read out loud. Mostly, these books bear no resemblance to the holiday recommendations in the papers: compare and contrast with the ones stacked up at the airport. But then, as CS Lewis pointed out, there are good bad (ie popular) books and bad good (serious)  books; the great thing is to read widely, and that’s what holidays give you time for.

Detective fiction is perfect on hols: Georges Simenon, say. Or if you want to approach the First World War as seen at the time, John Buchan’s Greenmantle is a cracking read.

The reality is that an awful lot of people around you will be holding screens with games on, not books. But for some of us, the chance of reading time longer than a Tube ride is what you cherish on holiday.

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