The Perfect Holiday Reading List?

I'm taking 2 weeks in Wales to write, and  thought this article from The Conversation by Andrew Tate, Reader in English at Lancaster University, might be interesting.

Hell is not, as Sartre suggested, other people – it’s a holiday without books. Holidays, with their promise of carefree pleasure seeking, might seem like the most materialistic of activities. Yet the name has sacred roots: the holy day suggests a time set apart from the ordinary flow of life.

I can tolerate zigzag queues and disappointing hotel rooms but a lack of literature would ruin my trip. For some of us there is no greater pleasure, or more sacred thing, than the imaginative travel afforded by a good book.

Holiday reading fan.

The great philosopher Blaise Pascal believed that human misfortune was the result of other people’s inability “to sit quietly in one’s room”. I’m not sure where Pascal liked to spend his summer break – Disneyland Paris hadn’t opened its gates in the 1600s – but if forced to leave the tranquillity of his room for adventure and the promise of ice cream, it’s probable that he would have filled his suitcase with literature as well as factor 50. And, if he were to ask for a few suggestions, I might recommend this mini-library of my all-time holiday reading favourites. Take note, if you want a real break on your travels.

First chapter

Clive James’s absurdly funny and sad Unreliable Memoirs (1980) is the first book that I remember reading on a beach. I was 16 and should have been focusing on other things, like the exhilarating surf and real human beings, but this “novel disguised as an autobiography” snagged me and encouraged a lifelong belief that words placed in the right order are a kind of magic.

James’s rites of passage tales of suburban Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s are intense in their specificity, evoking a distant world and way of life. But his askew take on the ritual humiliations and surprising freedoms of childhood are so resonant that they might connect with anybody who remembers what it is to be young, awkward and excessively bookish.

In another world. Soloviova Liudmyla/Shutterstock.com

The family saga

This evocation of the idiosyncrasies of family life anticipates the fiction of James' fellow Australian, Tim Winton. I especially recommend Cloudstreet (1991), now widely regarded as a classic of world literature, which follows the fortunes of two families who are compelled by separate losses to share a house for two decades.

Winton writes with a distinctive lyricism about Western Australia but this is also a compelling family saga of the pious, industrious Lambs and their worldly, fortune-seeking peers, the Pickles. There are few better writers of landscape and this is a visceral narrative full of elemental detail, salty humour and raw feeling.

The page turner

Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (2011) is likely to prompt less refined reader responses: fear, laughter and the need-to-know-what-happens-next are the big pleasures in the first of a rather Dickensian sequence that blends police procedural with the supernatural.

PC Peter Grant, a rare fictional detective who seems to be perfectly sociable, becomes a kind of wizard’s apprentice in the Met and investigates crimes that leave his peers clueless. The genre term “urban fantasy” may discourage but this is witty, smart contemporary fable that represents a mischievous rewriting of the rules of classic detective fiction.

Donna Tartt wants to know why you haven’t read The Goldfinch yet. Bas Czerwinski/EPA

The tome

A long break might create space to grapple with one of the big books of our time: Donna Tartt’s ambitious The Goldfinch (2013), which blends art, obsession and the search for home, is perhaps the closest thing to the experience of reading a 19th-century triple-decker published in recent years; it is rich with character, incident, plot twist and, yes, many pages. I found it utterly absorbing and the fact that it isn’t brief is part of the pleasure.

When homesick

Holidays might encourage escape from everyday life but they’re also a good opportunity to reflect on our understanding of home and belonging. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004), is a kind of hymn to the joys of not travelling: John Ames, a minister facing up to mortality, reflects on the ordinary mysteries of life in the titular mid-Western town in a series of letters to his young son.

Robinson, in common with otherwise very different novelists such as John Irving and Stephen King, is brilliant at world building. We might have little in common with a Calvinist minister living in 1950s Iowa but Robinson opens up his particular world in a way that encourages both thought and emotional connection. Gilead offers an alternative take on the velocity (and restlessness) of contemporary Western life.

In her brilliant poem, Questions of Travel (1956), partly inspired by Pascal’s defence of staying put, Elizabeth Bishop asks: “Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?” If you are similarly sceptical about tourism, I recommend this pile of books and the out-of-office reply as an alternative trek into new lands.

Defying the norm? Hardly, the Edinburgh Fringe defines it

This is interesting if you are performing or considering visiting the Edinburgh Festival.  We personally love it, (the picture above is us at Edinburgh in 1992!) but I understand the sentiment expressed here, by Stephen Greer, Lecturer of Theatre Practices at Glasgow University.  Reprinted from The Conversation, with permission.


This year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe slogan – “defying the norm since 1947” – might make for good marketing. But it hardly reflects the role of the world’s largest arts festival accurately. Far from supporting risk, the environment of the Fringe is increasingly one in which playing safe is the best way to avoid losing out.

The origin story to which the Fringe’s slogan refers is well rehearsed. In 1947, eight theatre groups turn up uninvited to perform at the Edinburgh International Festival. Though they’re not in the official programme, they perform anyway and are joined by larger numbers of independent performers in the following years. This leads to the formation of the Festival Fringe Society in 1958 as an organisation dedicated to supporting an “open-access arts event that accommodates anyone with a story to tell and a venue willing to host them”.

If the Edinburgh International Festival is the conservative parent – programming international artists to perform elite cultural forms of opera, classical music and canonical theatre – then the Fringe has been imagined as the more adventurous younger child engaged in a creative free-for-all.

But the claim that the Fringe is transgressive becomes less convincing when you consider the commercial and professional pressures of the festival. Above all else, increasing costs have created powerful disincentives to taking creative risks.

Charlie Wood of the Underbelly venue suggests that acts should consider the Fringe in one of three ways: as an expensive holiday, as a highly uncertain attempt to make money, or in the “hope your show will get bought and find a future life”. Putting on any show requires significant personal investment or the support of a production company that will gamble on your behalf (while also invoicing you for the privilege).

In the competitive mainstream of the festival, even a comparatively modest solo show can stand to lose £5,000 or £10,000 against fees for venue hire and marketing. An agreement for a standard box-office split with a venue will contain a guarantee against loss that means artists pay a deposit which is only returned when a certain proportion of tickets have been sold. A month of accommodation alone may cost more than £1,000 and a full listing in the print edition of the official Fringe programme itself costs £393.60 – again, all paid in advance.

In turn, the Fringe programme polices cultural standards for good taste. In its style guide, the Fringe Office reserves the right to edit any images or text that they judge “to be inappropriate in any way” and censors “potentially offensive” words with asterisks. This policy meant that Fringe-regular Richard Herring’s show appeared in the 2012 programme under the thinly-veiled title Talking C*ck: The Second Coming.

The standing of the Fringe as an industry trade show carries its own conservative dynamics. Viewing the Fringe as an investment that might lead to more lucrative work, major comedy agencies routinely offer contracts which guarantee a loss to the act, even if every ticket is sold. Stories of successful Fringe runs with packed houses and glowing reviews that end with an invoice for thousands of pounds are not uncommon.

While notionally interested in discovering the next new thing, talent scouts and BBC commissioning editors are also carefully watching their own budgets, and often prove unwilling to depart from tried and tested formulas. Though women in comedy have found increasing recognition over the past ten years, the choices of agents and bookers have been slow to change and reflect the continued wider dominance of opportunities for men across the industry. When Bridget Christie won the Foster Comedy Award in 2013, she was only the third woman to take the prize for a solo show since its inception in 1981.

In the current environment, the Edinburgh International Festival’s ability to exercise its own largely independent artistic choices means that the older festival may be in a far stronger position to foster work that “defies the norm”. Though the programme still reflects its heritage through choices of classical music and opera, this festivial still increasingly supports experimental choreography and performance by directly commissioning work.

One highlight of this year’s programme is Untitled Project’s production of Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner – first presented at Glasgow’s Tramway venue. This re-staging is particularly significant because it marks a continued life for a highly acclaimed, experimental company who were forced to close their doors when the Scottish Arts Council ending their funding earlier this year.

None of this means that experimental, adventurous or transgressive work won’t appear in this year’s Fringe. But the environment of the festival is far from inherently supportive of creative risk. While there is a significant body of new writing in each year’s programme, the public discourse of the Fringe is dominated by a small number of performance forms – primarily stand-up and naturalistic drama. The sheer scale of the Fringe – 50,459 performances of 3,314 shows in 313 venues, including 807 free shows – also means that smaller companies struggle to be get the word out about their work even when they are taking significant risks.

It’s no coincidence, then, that the increasingly popular organisations that make up the “fringe of the fringe” are characterised by an attempt to encourage experimentation by offering venues and performances free of charge to artists and audiences alike. PBH’s Free Fringe, Free Festival and Forest Fringe rely on volunteer labour, with artists pitching in to operate lights and run the box office. This is supported in turn with direct fundraising, as in the Free Fringe’s annual fundraising gala, and the Forest Fringe’s crowdfunding campaign to cover costs including an accessibility day for hearing impaired audiences.