What books are you all taking on holiday?

[RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie]

I've got:

A history of the Tower of London
The Historian (to re-read)
A History Of The World In 100 Objects
Some Poe short stories
A Wilkie Collins
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day (re-read)
The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

Hopefully one a day will be enough!

I've got one big book to take with me: The Devil Dancers by T. Thurai. It's about Ceylon in the 1950s. It's very atmospheric. I can't put it down (I've already missed a couple of stops on the train!)
For other books of a similar genre, I'd also recommend: A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth), A House for Mr Biswas (V. S. Naipaul), A Passage to India (E. M. Forster)
For light humour, I also love Mapp and Lucia. I'd also recommend Alistair McCall-Smith's First Ladies' Detective agency series and anything by P.G. Wodehouse.

Sara, thanks for suggestions. The Devil Dancers looks just my sort of book. Would make an interesting addition to Brixton Beach (Roma Tearne) and A Disobedient Girl (Ru Freeman) both set in Sri Lanka and which I've already read. I don't have a Kindle though and the paperback is over £20 even on Amazon however will keep an eye out for it in future .. or buy a Kindle maybe!

Remus, yes, Q&A is the name of the book; I'd always meant to read it so thanks for the reminder. That's a definite for the holiday pile.

Nora, the kids have grown up and DH likes getting absorbed in a book on holiday too so there's loads of time for reading. We usually have one decent walk a day, the odd game of tennis and spend the rest of the time swimming and reading it's a hard life Having a good choice of enough books is crucial; sounds daft but I would panic if I didn't have something good lined up to read!

Does anyone else remember vividly where they were when they read a particular book? I can recall exactly the different beaches I was on when I read The Life of Pi, American Wife and Wolf Hall, for example. My memories of the novel sort of become part of my remembered impressions of the holiday. Or is it just me?

I'd think twice about taking The Great Sea. I like sweeping histories myself, but I thought this one got too bogged down in detail with not enough interesting vignettes along the way. I gave up around p345.

Highland, I read Captain Corelli's Mandolin in Vienna (didn't even like it that much) and ended up with very confused geography!

No, no, no to the poster thinking of Kate Mosse. There are many better books out there!

My list is totally random:

Once More, With Feeling: How we tried to make the greatest porn film ever
Victoria Coren, Charlie Skelton
Inventing the Victorians - Matthew Sweet
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them - Elif Batuman

And, if the library produces them in time and I can physically carry them:
In the shadow of the sword - Tom Holland
Sex and Punishment - Berkowitz, Eric

And my sole fiction choice: Kingdom of Strangers - Zoe Ferraris.

Really looking forward to that little lot!

And proud Mapp and Lucia boast - yesterday I picked up all 6 books for 50p each! Couldn't resist even though I own them already (books stored in parents' house which is faaar away).

For Mapp and Lucia fans, the recent biography of EF Benson's mother (Good as Gold, Clever as the Devil) is really enjoyable.

Winter in Madrid only 89p so have snapped that one up!

Taking everything on my kindle, will choose when I get there. Too many to list, but plenty overlap with those already listed.

Plus some Inspector Montalbano , Sisters Brothers and a few classics such as Great Gatsby, The Way we Live Now and a re-read of Madame Bovary and The Moonstone!!

I have Freedom but it is in (huge) paperback and we travel hand luggage only so it will have to be read at home!

And just to say I was rather underwhelmed by The sense of an ending. Just a bit "non" to me....

I took Freedom last year and really enjoyed it - was worth the suitcase space although there was one subplot that I thought could happily have been edited out.

Nickname - committed to The Great Sea now as DH wants to read it too! In return I get to read his Louisa Young which looks good.

I took - and read -
Amsterdam - Ian McKewan
A Blue Afternoon - William Boyd
Retribution - Val McDermid
The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wicked Girls - Alex Marwood
A Perfectly Good Man - Patrick Gale
The Absolutist - John Boyne
Really enjoyed them all and finished the last one half an hour before we landed coming home
I recommend Mapp and Lucia too- haven't read them for years but excellent - witty and beautifuly written!
Have now started the first Shardake book - so far I'm enjoying.
Oh and A Perfect Gentleman was fab, definitely the one of his I've liked best so far but The Absolutist a v v close second!

I've just read 'The Marriage Plot' - I enjoyed it but not a patch on 'The Virgin Suicides' I thought. I think both this and 'Middlesex' suffer from being fairly slight stories written in a long format ie: lots of 'filling' in them.

I took:

The Paris Wife
Night Wakings
Afterwards (Rosamund Lupton? Lipton)
Angelmaker - Nick Harkaway. But I'd recommend THe Gone Away World. Gutted to finish it.

Dd very obliging by having a feed, which slipped into a nap every afternoon. Dh had to deal with ds; I got to read.

Yes, I enjoyed The Marriage Plot but thought it took a long time to go a sort distance! Perhaps I'll try some of his others though........

short distance!

Deffo try, 'The Virgin Suicides' - it was his first novel and he isn't trying too hard with it, as I think he is with the other two!

I read Victoria Hislop "The Thread" which I enjoyed. I must say I was the only woman not reading "Fifty Shades of Grey" around the pool.

I enjoyed:

The Paris Wife (fictionalised account of Hemingway's first wife - v interesting)
My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (1st World War weepy but has an unusual angle)
A Perfectly Good Man (typical Patrick Gale story set in Cornwall)
Bring up the Bodies (fab follow up)

Like the sound of The Gone Away World but will wait until it's in paperback. :)

I am taking...

The Hunger Games (wondering what all the fuss is about!)
Vilette
Voices -Ursula Le Guin
Island by the Sea - Isabelle Allende
Like water for Chocolate (re-read, it's a comfort book!)

Winter in Madrid is currently on offer for Kindle at less than £1.

I see someone else had already spotted Winter in Madrid as a bargain. I read much less on holiday normally than at home for some reason.

The Indian subcontinent - I love Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Sister of My Heart (and some of her other books) and Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things. I'm currently reading The Taliban Cricket Club, about a young woman in Kabul.

Two of the other reviewers on www.curiousbookfans.co.uk review lots of books set in the region, and it's worth looking there for inspiration, and I believe one of them has reviewed The Taliban Cricket Club.

Thanks for the pointers, elkiedee. I've used librarything and goodreads but haven't heard of curiousbookfans so will definitely have a look :)

Which of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's books would you recommend as a first read?

Sister of My Heart was the first Divakaruni I read and is one that's mainly set in India (a lot of the others are about Indian people settling in the US).

I took 'Island By The Sea' but didn't read it - I kept picking it up and feeling tired of it before I'd even started!

Loved 'The Perks Of being A Wallflower' except for the stupid Aunt Helen stuff at the end, which really spoiled it for me.

Liked the Wilkie Collins - have already forgotten what it was called but it was about love rivals in polar regions (so just my sort of thing!).

Enjoyed 'The Historian' but nowhere near as much as first time around - this time I saw its flaws, whereas the first time I just enjoyed it for the story.

Miss Pettigrew - fab as always!

Tower thing - okay but WHY were they all called Henry, Edward and William? I keep losing track of who is who and because he also meanders around and doesn't always write in chronological order it gets v confusing.

Poe - hard going on the beach, I found.

Also read - King's 'Dreamcatcher' which I found in the apartments (and enjoyed much more second time around - hated it when it came out!) and a pretty stupid Dean Koontz, also found in the apartments - and found and read Pride And Prejudice too.

Left '100 Objects' at home in the end and will read later.

Themumsnot mentioned The Song of Achilles. Has anyone here read it? I downloaded a sample on my kindle last night and was put off by the first few pages, so wanted to know if I should continue.

hackmum - I've got The Song of Achilles waiting on my kindle. I read the sample and liked it. It's a step away from the sort of books I would normally read, but it seemed worth a go.

I found 100 objects quite hard to read all the way through - no real line of narrative connecting them. More for dipping in and out of.