Books

Picture the scene: it’s 8 p.m. on a Tuesday. You’re sitting on the sofa in the home of someone you barely know, gulping supermarket wine, making inane chitchat with friends of friends as you all put off the inevitable: discussing a book only a third of the women – always women – in the room have actually bothered to read. In your head, you’re counting the minutes until you can excuse yourself for the last train home, wondering what’s happening on tonight’s Bake Off and engineering a strategy to quietly remove yourself from the group WhatsApp without appearing rude. You stifle a yawn and subtly check your watch while necking yet more wine. Sound familiar? Welcome to book club.

It’s hard to beat escaping into a book – but for bookworms looking for an escape that jumps off the page, there are plenty of hotels that cater to a love of all things literary. From a Cornish coastal retreat that’s been immortalised in fiction to a book-strewn adults-only resort on a South Pacific island, here are eight of the best hotels in the world for book-lovers. The only question that remains is what holiday reading to take with you. Carbis Bay Hotel, Cornwall A luxury beachfront resort just outside St Ives, Carbis Bay Hotel appears as The Sands Hotel in two of Rosamunde Pilcher’s novels, The Shell Seekers and Winter Solstice.

As soon as I picked up the parcel, my heart sank. The sheer weight of it gave the game away. Already I could unhappily picture myself struggling to hold it in one hand without straining a wrist while standing on the Piccadilly Line. I’d ordered it after coming across a couple of positive references to it in quick succession: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Written in the 1980s, set in the 1870s, it’s a cowboy story that won a Pulitzer in its day and still has its enthusiasts. I just hadn’t thought to check its length. In fact the paperback isn’t much smaller than a box of Kleenex and runs to 839 pages. That’s scarcely less than my paperback of Ulysses and more than other whoppers I’ve read lately, The Magic Mountain and Our Mutual Friend.

I do not yet have any children of my own, but a large extended family means plenty of young nieces and nephews to buy presents for come birthdays and Christmas. Those moments provide an opportunity to indulge in some pedagogic guidance: I’ll be damned if you're getting the latest Fifa game for the PlayStation 5 – you can have a real football to kick around outside. Ditto the inevitable requests for Nintendo virtual reality headsets and Frozen merchandise. Happily, I’ve got at least one Christmas present this year sorted already – and I’m quietly confident my nephew is going to enjoy reading it as much as I just have. Lord Robert Baden-Powell’s life-guide book Rovering to Success is a century old this year.

Recently, Spectator writers shared their all-time favourite summer holiday reads. In response, Spectator readers have been offering their own recommendations for what books to take to the beach… 'You might try Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, a history of oil politics. It starts with the simple fact that in evolving from the steam to petroleum age, the old western powers no longer had direct access to fuel and faced a growing dependency on oil from Russia, initially, and then the Middle East. The US, of course, is an exception as it has domestic resources – but foreign policy errors led to it being the guarantor of petroleum resources to the rest of Nato.

Chances are you will have heard of Hay-on-Wye. You might even have been. It’s the town on the Anglo-Welsh border where more than 30 years ago a man called Peter Florence began what has become the world’s most famous literary festival. Now some 200,000 people descend on the place each May and June, and for 11 days it feels like the centre of the literary universe, with hordes carrying tote bags traipsing hither and thither and pubs and restaurants overflowing like Venice in high summer. If that’s what floats your boat, then get stuck in. But for my money, Hay is worthy of a visit in its own right – and preferably when all those other visitors (not to mention ex-presidents and Booker prize-winners) aren’t there.

The flights are booked, the passports are dusted down and it’s time to pack. But which books deserve space in your suitcase? Here, Spectator writers share their all-time favourite summer holiday reads… Matthew Parris My all-time favourite re-read at any time of year is Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. A very short novel with the kind of perfection a geometrical proof may command, it starts with the death of a group of travellers crossing a Peruvian rope bridge who are linked only by the fact that they were on the bridge when it snapped, and traces the life of each up until that point. Wilder’s quest is to discover whether there exists any divine plan. Toby Young For pure escapism, I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes is hard to beat.