It’s the summer holidays – finally we have the chance to relax on the sun lounger and escape into a good book. This is the one time of the year when we can read at our leisure, undisturbed by colleagues and urgent deadlines, enjoying a nice glass of something chilled.
Except that life is never really quite that simple, particularly for the time-poor, information-sated bourgeois professional on a break. July and August may offer a brief respite from the cut and thrust of working life, but questions will be asked when you return to the daily grind – just what did you read during your stay in Tuscany/Suffolk/the Dordogne? Are you au fait with the Bailey’s shortlist? Have you grappled with Knausgaard? And where are you at with economics, psychology and popular science? There may be a respite from work-related reading, but not from the demands of dinner parties yet to come.
So how should we make our choice? Attempting this can mean a substantial investment of time in itself. Scrolling through the culture sections of the quality news sites is daunting – the great and the good are all at it, reading away, brains whirring as their bodies soak up the heat. The political biographers are absorbing the sexy new political biographies, the historians are perusing historical tomes bursting with on-trend opinions, while the TV chefs are gobbling up sumptuous recipe books.
