Holiday Reading Extravaganza by Various

A month-long holiday equates to a grown-up MS Read-a-thon for me. I love nothing more than packing a stack of books, lying somewhere with amazing scenery in the sun and devouring some choice words. You also want to choose books that are good, but not so good that you can’t bear to leave them in the spot that you finished them, ditching some excess baggage and making room for a newbie.

Since I can barely remember some of these, I won’t mess around.

The Lucy Family Alphabet by Judith Lucy

I started reading this on the plane, so it was the perfect pick up and put down type book, essential for when you’re on the move and not needing to get too involved with anything demanding. As Amber observed after reading it, it’s not a real book, which is true – it would have made a better Good Weekend feature. But parts of it were laugh out loud hilarious, probably only because I could imagine her whisky-voiced delivery. Non-Aussie readers would have absolutely NO IDEA what to make of this, and probably the thing I liked most about it was its sense of place; a crazy 70’s Australia filled with racist dads, cocktail franks and bad furniture.

A Song in the Daylight by Paullina Simons

Take the shame. I’m embarrassed to admit that I took this 700 page phone book with me, but I’d read one of hers in Brazil and chowed through it (the much better, or at least at the time, A Girl in Times Square, but on reflection I was probably just desperate for a book in English by that part of the trip). This was total housewife porn, where the woman has the perfect life, with shitty descriptive crap like ‘Larissa didn’t have a single mole marking her alabaster skin’ – who the fuck doesn’t have a mole on their ENTIRE body? Is she a robot? Anyway, it was completely vacuous and the two main American characters died the most ridiculous death in the outback of Australia. The end. Rancid. And I gained about 2kgs back in my suitcase. It was well shameful.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

This was freaking awesome – one of those ‘It’s raining on my tropical holiday so I’m just going to read this book in 8 hours’ kind of reads. A book where the animal analogies actaully mean something, and aren’t just some lazy author threading. I’ve long had a soft spot for Indian authors (that original voice is like no other – punchy and so descriptive you can smell what they’re talking about) and it really took me from the poverty afflicted Darkness to the pollution filled streets of New Dehli. Take me there now.

Petropolis by Anya Ulinich

Post Chernobyl pulp fiction, of which I cannot recall much, so clearly I didn’t rate it.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larrsson

I personally blame this book for kicking off my ‘Illiteracy Disease’ of the second half of my trip; I started reading this, got about two-thirds of the way through, got to London and then couldn’t read a word that wasn’t accompanied by a glossy picture for the next fortnight. Of course it could have had something to do with arriving in London, but I prefer to blame this book, which was a pretty good plot spoiled by some grossly violent details. Goes to show that when you finally cave and read a book just because everyone you see on the bus is, things will not be pretty and there was a reason you didn’t read the goddamn thing in the first place. This is why I’ve never read Harry Potter and never will.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Ahh the feted ‘Book You Take for the Plane Ride Home’ – possibly the hardest choice of all, but this beauty delivered on so many fronts. It was like reading a hip-hop song, if you can bear with me; original, fierce, lyrical and with something pretty important to say. Diaz as an author from the Dominican Republic has this completely unique insight into the atrocities committed in his country (which to be honest I knew nada about – I suspect his target demo) and is able to create what is almost two tales within one; an achingly funny and tender fiction book about the hapless Oscar Wao, with its pigeon pairing an unflinching non-fiction exploration into political corruption in DR.