Books you read because there was nothing else

[Parisbanana]

I am on holiday and thought I had plenty with me....2 quite hefty tomes and a regular sized paperback which would normally do me fine as I'm not a quick reader.
Anyway it is a while since we've had a beach holiday where the kids are self sufficient a lot of the time. So I've had more time than before to read.
So I scanned the bookshelf in the holiday cottage and I have now read Animal Farm and Of Mice and Men.
Would never have chosen them normally, but I really really enjoyed them both.

Only problem is they're both so short I need to find something else and it's all in French!

So anyone else?

In my pre-kindle days, I once ended up reading a book from the shared bookshelf at the resort.

I got nearly all the way through it before realising I had read it before - it was me who'd left it on the shared bookshelf, the year before.

I make really ambitious reading choices when I go away...one year I only took Moby Dick and swapped it for Legally Blonde in the hotel. Rubbish, but at least it was readable

I was given The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by an aunt and put it off for aaaaaaages. Started it in a fit of extreme boredom and had read the whole trilogy two weeks later.

I HAD the unfortunate experience of being stuck in Pakistan for 3 days waiting for a delayed connecting flight and it was unsafe for me to leave the hotel. This was about 20 years ago. The only book in my possession was River God by Wilbur Smith. It is was so bad I sat in my room with tears rolling down my face but it was still better than nothing. I've never read another Wilbur Smith and thankfully due to modern technology should never be in that situation again

I used to be trapped in a caravan for 5-6 weeks of a wet Scottish summer every year as a young teenager, and have read most of Jean Plaidy, the Miss Read series (anyone remember them?), Catherine Cookson ... and Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas. The last one came as a very welcome change from my mum's normally anodyne reading taste

I count myself very lucky now
When we've been I laces before with a selection of books they've always been James Patterson, John Grisham, maeve Binchy, that type of thing.
A couple if years ago we were in Provence and the only English book on the shelf was The Olive Farm or something by Carol Drinkwater, a memoir shout her buying an olive farm in the south of France. I actually quite enjoyed it.

Scuse typos I'm on phone and am drinking lots of French wine while its cheap!

highland, I remember Miss Read! And I also read a parental copy of Virgin Soldiers as an impressionable teacher and was highly shocked.

I was stuck reading Back from Africa, the sequel to The White Masai. God it was bad. Talking about her climb up Mt Kilimanjaro, one of the few details she gave was that one of her companions had a lot of toiletries.

I read a book by Mary Gentle, in a Gravewww.goodreads.com/book/show/741880.A_Sundial_in_a_Grave after picking it up in a hostel in Turkey and loved it - big enough to keep me going for while during a long solo trip.

link fail. Alternative history is not my usual choice of genre, but I enjoyed that one.

I haven't done that recently, but years ago on holiday I used to run short of books and buy some of the limited number of English books available at French booksellers. i remember reading the Father Brown stories by G.K. chesterton, I wasn't interested in detective stories then, but I enjoyed them very much. I also remember reading The Darling Buds of May by H.E. Bates, i enjoyed that too. And a funny book called The Great Dinosaur Robbery by David Forest, which was quite amusing.

I was stuck in a boyfriends flat alone one christmas morning while he worked in the pub downstairs. The only book in the place was Soul Music by Terry Pratchett. I read it and became obsessed. I have a house literally full of 'discanalia' and i write a Pratchett blog . That turned out to be a very expensive read!!

When I was a teenager, we used to rent a flat in Cornwall each year. It had a cupboard full of hundreds of back numbers of Readers Digest. I must have read them all over the years. Don't know why, I would have taken books with me, and would have been encouraged to buy more if necessary.

I once read part of a Mills & Boon in a caraven. Fortunately, the weather cheered up.

Vanity Fair. It was really good!

Bravo Two Zero by Andy Mcnab, dh had been telling me to read it for years and I never did, until one day desperate for something to read I picked it up and read the first few pages. I couldn't put it down, then I read his fiction books, he's a brilliant man, ex SAS double hard bastard and a very talented writer.

All the Jill and her pony books when I was about 7 at a French campsite and had no interest in ponies.
Tess Of The D'Urbervilles when I was stuck on a boat in Holland aged about 10. I can't have understood much of it

Since then I have made sure never to run out of books.

I quite like those Readers Digest things, I still remember a story about someone lost in a jungle, it was fascinatingly graphic about all the insect bites etc.

One of the things I find a bit sad about the targeted books, telly, films etc is that my DC's aren't forced to look for entertainment in the same way, so just don't discover gems on bookshelves/BbC2 etc. They're a bit iffy about secondhand book shops too, it's just too much work.

I was driven to Jack Reacher when my Kindle died in the middle of Utah, the only shop in town sold Mormon books. I'm now an addict.
This year it was Graham Greene in an idle moment, really glad of it now, terrific stories.

Many years ago my husband ran out of books . The only other English couple on the site had got 2 books with them; a car manual and a gardening book. He refused to try 'War and Peace' which I had[smugly] brought with me, and we spent several miserable days driving around looking for anywhere that stocked English language books. He never made the same mistake again. Incidentally I really enjoyed 'War and Peace' but could have done with a map to follow the 'War' sections.

OP that's some classy holiday let you got there, with Animal Farm and Of Mice & Men on the bookshelf. It's usually 1980s thrillers and Maeve Binchy wherever I go.

But ran out of books last week on holiday and got Hey Nostradamus! from the Keycamp bookshelf. It was so good (imvho) that I started a thread on who else writes like Coupland. I'd forgotten how much I liked his work.

*Volestair, that wasn't a Mills & Boon, that was morphine.