BOOKS FOR SUMMER
Let's hope for a good summer. Here are some ideas to keep you entertained in the long hours of sunshine.

Some people put more thought into their holiday reading than neo-conservatives put into a foreign invasion but the trend is for ever later choices. Where once the port terminal afforded a vital fifteen minutes to scan the year’s blockbusters, now a tablet enables holidaymakers to make their pick on the veranda of a Tuscan villa, in the souk of a Moroccan market or – let’s not be too glamorous about this - on the wet plastic table of a seafront Southend chippie.

 

Being more rigorous than most, a small pile of novels already stands precariously on an overstuffed pine bookcase in the Burton-Jones household. Robert Harris’ An Officer and a Spy about the infamous trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a harbinger of the fury of twentieth century continental Europe’s antisemitisim is a sure bet, with Harris’ gift for historical narrative. One Night in Winter, the second novel of historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, set in the depth of Russia’s Stalinist chill, should have an instinctive feel for the era’s terrifying paranoia. Finally, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, a love story dealing with globalisation, immigration and race and ranging across Nigeria, the United States and Britain follows up her previous novel Half a Yellow Sun.

 

If you take just one fiction and one non-fiction on holiday with you, I would recommend Dave Egger’s The Circle and Alwyn Turner’s A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s. There is great pleasure in reading a novel as impeccably contemporary as The Circle. Set largely on the campus of a monolithic Silicon Valley company which has taken over both Google and Facebook, it charts the career of a bright, well meaning but credulous woman who helps The Circle in its vaulted ambition to record all human experience. Its mantras:

SECRETS ARE LIES; SHARING IS CARING; PRIVACY IS THEFT satirise with Orwellian authority the vision of the new tech overlords to make personal lives transparent for others.

Egger achieves in a novel what a hundred newspaper articles could not manage by identifying the philosophical challenges posed by the digital age and shows, intentionally or not, the risks of idolatry in the most liberating of inventions. More to the point, it is a wonderful read.

 

A Classless Society is long enough to last the holiday but I devoured it quickly in the indolent days following Christmas because it is so beautifully written, wryly observational and tellingly astute. The 90s were a strange decade which we find hard to define. The 60s swung with hippies, the Kings Road and the mini car; the 70s with Abba, flared trousers and the three day week; the 80s with Margaret Thatcher, yuppies and the miners’ strike, but what of the 90s? John Major? Britain’s exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism? Back to Basics?
We owe much more to the 90s than we appreciate in how we live today, and the book feels like living, breathing history. New lads, New Labour, Cool Britannia, Diana’ death, the ending of the Soviet Union, the re-drawing of Europe’s map, the era of genocide, the emergence of the internet – from trivial to profound, the 90s deserve the tribute Turner offers. Things I had forgotten and things I did not know littered the pages. Women priests get a cursory mention and the Alpha course none at all – two products of the decade which influenced the course of British society for good – but overall Turner’s quixotic eye for the overlook and the exceptional will keep you rampantly entertained.