Without doubt, the five most important pieces of advice in life are, in ascending order:
(5) Don't overestimate the opposition,
(4) Don't underestimate the opposition,
(3) Never take anyone for granted, and
(2)Always have a Plan B. And the number one most important piece of advice in life is...
(1) Make sure to take a set of good books when on holiday.
There's nothing to ruin one's mood like turning up on a sun-drenched beach with a parasol, tequila, and two weeks to kill, and realising that the only reading material available is the label on the suntan lotion.
This happened recently to a dear friend vacationing in the Union of Myanmar which, while stuffed to the gills with wondrous pagodas and ancient Buddhist scriptures in Pali, is dismally short of English-language publications.
After manfully reading the lotion label several hundred times over _ for pleasure, then readability, then grammar, then syntax, then spelling, then desperation _ the poor fellow lost, first, his sense of humour and then the desire to live, and can now only be contacted between four and six at a reputable home for the convalescent.
Forewarned is forearmed. As the year, the century and the millennium refract into a new age through the prismatic number 2000, see that your year-end vacation doesn't run into any supply-side snags.
To that end, we compile here, in no particular order, a list of books that are unlikely to disappoint. Contemporaneity is not a criterion; a rollicking good read is.
For the very nineties, reflexive reader, Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (1996) is a delightfully anecdotal look at the act of reading through the eyes of a man besotted by books from his infancy, who once read aloud to the great, blind, Jorge Luis Borges.
What Diane Ackerman does for the body in A Natural History of the Senses, or Isabel Allende for food in Aphrodite, Manguel does for the cultural history of reading. Light-handed, languorous, and filled with fascinating trivia, this is a brilliant aperitif to all other books.
Leave your Agatha Christies and P D Jameses firmly behind in the kitchen sink (do remember to leave the kitchen sink firmly behind too, else this tip doesn't work): the thriller to beat all thrillers, and offer a first rate education in medieval theology by the way, is The Name of the Rose (1983).
Umberto Eco takes his reader gorge and viscera into the 14th century Benedictine abbey of Melk, where the monks appear to be dying rather unpleasantly one by one. The Franciscan father William of Baskerville sets about solving the murders with wit and razor-sharp intelligence, towards an apocalyptic finale. This novel perfectly combines erudite detail and low fun.
For an action-packed read laced with eerie psychological turns, take Alex Garland's The Beach (1996). Even if you have no interest in backpacking in Southeast Asia with a bunch of maniacs, its virtually impossible to drop Garland's little gemstone of a novel, which he wrote at the age of 26 with all the authenticity of a young traveller's mind and the talent of a much more experienced author.
You're never too old for Douglas Adams's trilogy of four books, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant At the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe, and Everything, and So Long and Thanks For All the Fish.
