Holiday Reading

That I read almost 5 books in a glorious fortnight in Sardinia is a testament to the Olympic legacy of lethargy and laziness which prevailed during our family holiday. We all lounged, read, swam, ate, drank and repeated this cycle for 14 days - and nobody complained. We had bought the girls Kobos, the WH Smith budget e-reader; whilst not as good as Kindles, they did the trick and provided hours of reading. Celia, employing student tactics, downloaded all the free books (almost exclusively classics) and proceeded to work her way through Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy.

Meanwhile, my Kindle and I predictably enjoyed Skios by Michael Frayn which is a perfect holiday read and is laugh out loud funny. It was a light hearted contrast to Pure by Andrew Miller, the rather dour but beautifully executed tale of the excavation of an overflowing cemetery in pre-revolutionary Paris. I can understand why it won the Costa Award in 2011 and it is, despite the subject matter, a really rather touching story.

Mrs Robinson's Disgrace: the Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale shares many of the characteristics and much of the style of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and is an interesting social history of sex, divorce, diaries and health fads in the 1850s but I found the underlying facts less engaging: were Mrs R's diaries a scandalously true record of an affair or a fantasy crush and was she suffering from various real or imagined illnesses - this was for the reader, as well as the judges of the newly constituted divorce court, to decide. The illustration of a Victorian husband's total dominance of his wife was a vivid reminder of social and economic oppression and dual standards - a husband even owned the copyright in his wife's writings.

But for me, the read of the fortnight was, without fail, Bring Up the Bodies another huge novel by Hilary Mantel, which picks up the story of Thomas Cromwell at Wolf Hall and Henry VIII's introduction to Jane Seymour. I found it a completely compelling and absorbing book and loved every minute of it; in fact, I thought that the descriptions of the politics and diplomacy of the Tudor court were even better than in Wolf Hall. Her habit of referring to Cromwell as "he" persists but her editors have obviously tackled this so that there are countless references to "he, Cromwell" which, whilst clunky, is helpful (and there seemed to be fewer Thomases this time round). I can't wait for what I assume will be the third and final book even though, obviously, we know how the story ends.

And so now, it is back to the post- holiday laundry...... although, on second thoughts, perhaps there's the fifth book to finish first.