" Holiday reading " is a term capable of various
interpretations. Often it is used to indicate some special class of light literature, calculated to fall soothingly on the jaded mind. For me holiday reading means simply the books I have read on a holiday—such, for example, as the fortnightly holiday which has unhappily just ended. I went to no special thought or trouble about choosing the volumes to take with me (the main qualification was that they must be neither large nor heavy), but on the whole I look back with satisfaction on the fortnight's diet. These were two old familiars, Jane Eyre and Lavengro. The writers of both irritate me, Miss Bronte by her habit of sloppily (as it seems to me) referring to " the town of S--;" and the like, when it would be perfectly easy to invent a name, as she does in so many cases ; and also by her frequent and sudden
adjuration " Reader," as though to pull you back with a jerk from the living drama and remind you that after all It is only a novelist making up a tale. Borrow's capacity to irritate comes of his complacent sententiousness ; but the renewed acquaintance with Jasper Petulengro and Isopel Berners and the Flaming Tillman more than makes up for that. Then there was Sir Richard Living stone's admirable little volume of Thucydides, as translated by Crawley and others, greatly enriched by the editor's too rare but always apposite notes; Professor Hayek's The Path to Serfdom (which ought to have been studied adequately sooner) ; a Golden Treasury to dip into as the spirit moved; and three green Penguin detective stories as antidote to the tedium and discomfort of the train. In addition, Vincent Sheehan's Between Thunder and the Sun (lent me by a benefactress), one of the best of those books d travel and contact and rapportage which American journalists do so excellently well ; an anthropological Pelican on family customs in Samoa ; and finally a volume of Gosse's essays which some earlia sojourner had left behind. On the whole, I think, reasonably balanced and satisfying sustenance.
* * * *
Previous page
