I once took a collection of essays by Theodor Adorno on holiday with me. I did it on purpose, too. I thought to myself: right, this is the holiday on which I am going to read Theodor Adorno. And not only did I go to a bookshop that stocked him (you don’t find many of them around these days) but I brought it home and stowed it carefully in my suitcase between the shaving foam and my swimming trunks. Neither of them saw much action either. What on earth possessed me? I blame Terry Eagleton. His deft summary in Ideology had left the undergraduate me with the impression that Adorno would be interesting and might even be fun. That was, well, misleading. I suspect that even had I been able to get through the wretched thing, I would not have been able to make sense of it. And had I been able to make sense of it, I would have discovered that Theodor Adorno disapproved of going on holiday: that holidays were a structural manifestation of reactionary violence in the symbolic order, and that lastminute.com had effortlessly co-opted me into the hegemony. This would have bummed me out. Guilt would have ruined my holiday. I would have sat there, my sweat glowing clammy and my pineapple-based cocktail tasting of ash and dust, while my sunblock-smudged copy of The Culture Industry gave me the hairy eyeball from the lilo. As it was, my holiday was ruined by guilt in any case. Double guilt: I was feeling guilty about not managing to read Adorno, and feeling meta-guilt about not feeling guilty about the things that I was imagining I should be feeling guilty about. What I mean to convey with this tale of misfortune is that you should not choose your summer reading lightly. Baggage allowances being what they are these days, and not all of us having iPads, you are, in effect, choosing one of your closest companions for the next week or two. Do you really want to have to spend that time with a sullen Frankfurt-school theorist? Holiday readers generally fall into two camps. Some people, who don’t usually read because they haven’t got the time, or prefer talking to people or watching telly, go on holiday intending to read. They sigh with pleasure at the thought. “Nothing to do but relax with a good book,” they think. It doesn’t work the other way round, though. Those people who read books all year round—including I’d guess, most Prospect readers—don’t, in my experience, decide that they need a break from reading when they go on holiday. They don’t go away to socialise or watch telly. They, also, go on holiday to read. So here’s the anxiety. What do they read that’s different—that makes them feel like they’re on holiday? I think they go one of two ways. Either they go smart, or they go dumb. Adorno was me trying to go smart, and that crashed terribly. In the other direction, I’ve spent a holiday or two on Harry Potter. I don’t know if it’s just the paper they use, but the memory of sunshine flaring off the page still gives me a migraineous twinge. I have concluded that both moves are a mistake. If you don’t read difficult books during the course of your ordinary life, why make yourself read them on holiday? You’re supposed to be having fun. Likewise, though you meet the odd intellectual who refuses to take anything more challenging than Harlan Coben to the beach, is there the need? You can chew through your Father Cadfaels in the intervals between awake and asleep on any hardworking weekday. Snack-reading, like assembling “supper” out of pork scratchings and pickled eggs in the pub, is pleasurable but ultimately unsatisfying. So here’s my prescription. Don’t go smart or dumb—go big. Holidays are the ideal time for the uninterrupted assault on the doorstoppers. Waterstone’s urges you to buy three books for the price of two; instead, buy three books’-worth of books for the price of one. Turn the heavy artillery of your idle hours and the paratroops of your revitalised attention span on them. There are some books that are not susceptible to nibbling a page or two a night. Most of us, alas, are neither students, nor long-term unemployed, nor in jail. We have only so many years left on this earth, and each of those years has only one summer. When, but on holiday, will you be able to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, or Clarissa, Middlemarch, The Cairo Trilogy, A Suitable Boy, Moby Dick, 2666, Gravity’s Rainbow or Infinite Jest? When will you be able to read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem or Paul Scott’s Raj quartet? It’s not a question of doing a duty to the classics—some long books are glorious trash—rather, of apportioning your time so that the books that need long stretches of attention actually receive it. Somewhere in the collected essays of Theodor Adorno, I feel certain there’s a paragraph or two that would bear me out. Sam Leith is a freelance writer and editorProspect's summer booksFINANCEThe Big Short by Michael Lewis (Allen Lane, £25) This book is a remarkable achievement: it is as gripping as a thriller, yet it manages to explain the financial innovation that triggered the 2007-08 financial crisis in straightforward terms. It provides a lucid introduction to the world of subprime mortgages, asset-backed securities and credit default swaps through the eyes of people who understood what was going on—and profited handsomely in consequence. From his first book Liar’s Poker on, Lewis has demonstrated the capacity to illuminate a complex issue with the kind of telling observation that is the hallmark of great non-fiction prose. This is the only book on the financial crisis that you can read on the beach or by the side of a pool. Whether you knew nothing about the industry or a great deal, you’ll find much of interest and much to learn. John Kay is a British economistPSYCHOLOGYOn Balance by Adam Phillips (Hamish Hamilton, £20) “The talking cure turned up to show us what talking cannot cure.” This judgement on psychoanalysis by Adam Phillips, himself a practising analyst, gives a flavour of his new essay collection. It is not so much a paradox as a fact presented in paradoxical form. Like all of Phillips’s writing, On Balance radiates the rarest type of questioning intelligence—one that does not aim for solutions to problems but shows that looking for solutions is often the problem. Though the practice he invented has been turned into a problem-solving method, Freud did not see psychoanalysis as a solution; he didn’t even see life as a problem. We think we should be happy—but why, Phillips asks, does being happy matter so much to us? In these wise, witty and playful essays, taking in the nature of fundamentalism, excess, authenticity and much else, Phillips continues Freud’s work. John Gray is a political philosopherFICTIONThe Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (Viking, £12.99) Joshua Ferris’s second novel The Unnamed is a book I wish I’d written. He takes an apparently outlandish idea—a mysterious, undiagnosable physical and/or mental condition—and makes us believe in it, care about it, fear it. The story which unfolds is as cruel, dark and daring as it is filled with compassion and insight. It’s a meditation on the frailty of human minds and bodies and, like all the most satisfying novels, it is also ultimately about love, family and the extent to which those things can sustain and survive us. For me, even more exciting than all of that are the risks he takes with his prose. There’s real grace and beauty here, but also a kind of reckless elasticity that keeps on taking you by surprise and seems to push at the boundaries of what language can do. Julie Myerson is a novelistISLAMSon of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef (Authentic Media, £8.99) Son of Hamas is one of the most fascinating books of the year. Its author, Mosab Hassan Yousef, is a prince in Palestinian circles: his father is one of the founders of Hamas. He grew up opposite a cemetery filled with the bodies of kin killed in conflict: men, women, children. For Yousef, the enemy was never in doubt. The book charts his development from a boy throwing stones at Jews to an 18-year-old insurgent, detained at an Israeli military checkpoint while armed to kill. But, in prison, something happens to Yousef. He discovers members of Hamas torturing other members of Hamas, and his few simple convictions—that Arabs are the victims of Jews, that Islam is the answer and that jihad is the way—begin to break down. The rest of the book reveals the dark side of the Palestinian leadership. Yousef tells stories of blackmail, spying and betrayal. He is disowned by his father. In an extraordinary twist, he converts to Christianity. For anyone interested in a remarkable mental journey from a philosophy of the hereafter to a philosophy of the here and now, this book is a must-read. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a writer and activistPOLITICSRace of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (Penguin, £9.99) From the first sentence—“Barack Obama jerked bolt upright in bed at three o’clock in the morning”—this account of the 2008 presidential election grips with the intensity of a John Grisham thriller. The plots are up there with Grisham, too, particularly in the case of John Edwards. In a desperate bid to stay in the race, the candidate persuaded one of his campaign staff to claim he had fathered Edwards’s love-child. “Why didn’t you come to me like a fucking man and tell me to stop fucking her?” Edwards screams at an aide as it all falls apart. “They were both yelling now at the top of their lungs, red-faced and teary-eyed.” And that’s long before Sarah Palin enters stage right, with more screaming and hysterics. Then there’s the main Obama vs Clinton plot—interloper vs establishment; black vs white; youth vs age; man vs woman. The nail-bitingly close primary campaign unfolded over months criss-crossing America in pursuit of the most important prize in politics. After the final battle comes the final reunion: “On the brink of great power and awesome responsibility, he and Clinton were on the same team.” The human drama is inseparable from the political drama and, in showing this, Heilemann and Halperin have performed an artistic feat. Andrew Adonis is a former Labour ministerTHRILLER
Harrison Ford in the film of Presumed Innocent: will he appear in the sequel?Innocent by Scott Turow (Macmillan, £17.99) Holiday reading should not feel like work but nor should it be entirely play. My ideal is a thriller that combines narrative puzzles with quality prose and some social and political awareness. In recent years, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy has met this need. In 2010, it’s Scott Turow’s Innocent—a sequel, 20 years on, to Presumed Innocent, a high-point of the American legal thriller genre it helped create. In the original book, Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor, was on trial for murdering his mistress; now a judge, he stands accused of murdering his wife during a bitter local election campaign. The twists are hairpin and bewildering, the psychology is precise, and Turow’s manipulation of alternating points of view is impeccable. Turow, a practising lawyer, has done with law what John le Carré achieved with espionage, in adapting a populist genre for the purposes of probing character and the workings of the world. Mark Lawson is a journalist, broadcaster and authorSCIENCEThe Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford (Stacey International, £10.99) The hockey stick graph is to global warming what St Paul is to Christianity. The temperature line trundles along for centuries, then shoots through the roof in the 20th century like the blade of an ice-hockey stick. But it is wrong. The emails leaked from UEA last year show some scientists knew all along that it was problematic. Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion exposes how the mistake was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. This is a book about principal components, data-mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never been made thrilling before. Like the best science writers, Montford knows that the secret is to make the details delicious, even to the most unmathematical reader. I reviewed it for Prospect online when it was published and recommend it again in the wake of the inquiry into the UEA scandal. Matt Ridley is a science writerALSO RECOMMENDED: FICTION The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Sceptre, £18.99). With this story of love amid the clash of cultures, set in Edo-era Japan, Mitchell proves himself the leading British novelist of his generation. Alexander Linklater Tinkers by Paul Harding (William Heinemann, £12.99). This Pulitzer-winning debut about the hallucinations that visit an old man on his deathbed is a delicate, understated triumph. Mary Fitzgerald The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (Faber, £18.99). A novel of romantic love and loss with a mesmeric sense of place. Istanbul is for Pamuk as Dublin was for James Joyce. Ian Irvine In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (Atlantic, £15.99). In this powerful novel-cum-memoir, Galgut shows what it is to travel in the hope of acquiring knowledge or fulfilment, but always to end up disappointed. William Skidelsky
