Reading

I’m off for my annual digital detox: no ConservativeHome, no PoliticsHome, just my wife’s family home in Stockholm and swapping my Blackberry for a primitive mobile with a battery that lasts a week. But before I sign off completely, I’d like to abuse my position to ask CoffeeHousers for book recommendations. I’ve done this for three years now, and each year the results pretty much give me a reading list for the next 12 months. I’ve only now finished the last of summer 2010’s suggestions (Exodus, by Leon Uris.) I’m midway through Max Hastings brilliant All Hell Let Loose, which I’m interspersing with the restored World at War on DVD (a Pete Hoskin recommendation). They go brilliantly together.

When it comes to choosing good books to read on holiday, I am a great believer in selecting reading matter to match the destination. What better to read in Sicily than Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard, for instance? And how wonderful to read Laurie Lee’s beautiful As I Walked Out one Midsummer Morning while in Spain. This school of thought can be taken to extremes — I even have a friend who chooses her holidays based entirely on what she wants to read. The only downside to this approach is that when summer stretches ahead of you with no sunny holiday on the horizon, then you feel not only like you’re missing out on a lovely trip, but also on the chance for some exotic reading.

Robert Silverberg is the great 20th-century pioneer of science fiction, the multiple Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author of books such as Nightwings and Lord Valentine’s Castle. Robert Silverberg is the great 20th-century pioneer of science fiction, the multiple Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author of books such as Nightwings and Lord Valentine’s Castle. What few know, however, is that he is also the super-prolific author of scores of soft-porn pulp titles under pseudonyms such as John Dexter, Don Elliott and Loren Beauchamp.