Why Middlemarch is ‘the perfect beach read'

Spectator

6 days ago

At the time of writing, I am not more than a few hours away from leaving this dismal hell-hole and hightailing it for the South of France in a battered Skoda Octavia. And there, I shall settle down for a fortnight, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of 1970s camping – the blue gas-bottles; the nylon sleeping bags; the fold-out chairs where the cup-holder in the arm is torn so your Orangina plummets to the floor when you absent-mindedly deposit it there. Bliss.
And what will I do there, apart from squatting on my haunches to cook awful one-pot beany casseroles and eating croissants? Why, read, of course. Isn't that what holidays are, fundamentally, for? This is where my long-suffering wife and I find ourselves somewhat at odds. She thinks I am boring and antisocial and an all-round suboptimal husband because all I want to do on holiday is sit in a sunny place with a cold drink and a paperback.
Vigorous activities and sparkling conversation should, she thinks, also form part of a holiday. What's the point, she thinks, in going to a foreign country if all you're going to do there is sit in a chair and read a book, which is what you spend the rest of the year doing anyway? Also she thinks men, especially men with feet like mine, shouldn't wear flip-flops, that my straw hat makes me look like a wally (she doesn't say this, but I intuit it), and that if we ignore the children they will drown in the river. As they say: agree to disagree.
For most people of working age, the summer holiday is the one time when you can read continuously for a week or two – so what you take matters a good deal. This is your chance. But all sorts of myths surround the idea of 'holiday reading'. I'm forever being emailed by publicists, for instance, announcing that this book or that one – usually thrillers or romantic comedies – is 'the perfect beach read'.
Isn't that weird? In most of the rest of our lives, we feel under vague but palpable pressure to read something improving and high-minded – not what our more austere older relatives would dismiss as 'trash'. We reproach ourselves, many of us, about our failure to do so – dutifully chugging through ten pages of Middlemarch before bed and becoming ever more dispirited as the weeks pass. But then, at the one time of year when we could, for instance, read a couple of hundred pages of Middlemarch in a day and really get into it (there's a lot going on in that book: you do need to immerse yourself a bit), we get reading-shamed in the other direction. Now is, apparently, the time to get stuck into the new Dan Brown and if we insist on taking a Victorian classic we are, implicitly, the sort of pretentious person who doesn't know how to enjoy a holiday.
It should be, I suggest, quite the other way round. Think how much happier we'd all be if we read thrillers and chick-lit and science-fiction and all that lovely pulp in our day-to-day lives, when our batteries are low and our phones and emails a constant distraction, and saved up the more challenging material for our holidays. I don't say this to denigrate popular fiction – I love that stuff, and the writers who do it well are consummately skilled – but to note that there are different types of reading, and that the circumstances in which you read makes a difference to how enjoyable and successful a given type of reading will be.
It goes without saying, of course, that all of us should read what we damn well like when we damn well like, and that shaming people for what they read is one of the most insidious and philistine of our cultural contagions. But the holidays are a precious opportunity. They are the one time of year when we really do have leisure to properly immerse ourselves in a book. For what it's worth, I think there is something to the stereotype that paperbacks are best. Thick hardbacks are heavy, and e-books may help with the luggage allowance but reading on screen is tricky in bright sunshine and you don't have to worry about sand getting in the charging port of a paperback.
My own situation is a bit unusual, obviously. I am privileged to have a day job, as literary editor of this magazine and host of our weekly podcast, that involves a lot of reading. But it has given me a very distorted reading life: it means almost everything I read in the ordinary course of things is published within a month or two of the time in which I read it. Holidays, then, are usually the chance to catch up on things I've missed. Books by friends, for instance, which I've shamingly failed to find time for the rest of the year; classics I've never read; a bit of homework in advance; and, yes, sometimes 'something sensational to read on the train'.
So, this year I'm taking a mix: it's Elif Shafak's There are Rivers in the Sky (she's a great writer and I've been wanting to read this for a year), Stuart Jeffries's A Short History of Stupidity (something chewy and, hopefully, also fun), Graham Robb's The Discovery of Britain (forthcoming work by another fine writer), Terry Pratchett's The Night Watch (reissued classic I've never read)… and David McCloskey's Damascus Station (spy thriller friends have raved about) on the Kindle for emergencies – because the great thing about holiday reading is you don't have to follow even your own rules. And once I've read them, if she hasn't divorced me, I'll put some proper shoes on and have a conversation with my wife.