Ian Rankin
The art of holiday reading
I always take a slew of books with me on holiday. Some I will have read before—Bleak House or Heart of Darkness, for example. Some will be recent non-fiction, like Simon Gray's The Last Cigarette (Granta). There may be a biography of a maverick rock singer such as Tom Waits, or a psychedelic group such as Hawkwind. I'll take a few contemporary thrillers—such as Romanno Bridge by Andrew Greig (Quercus) and crime novels by the likes of Allan Guthrie, James Lee Burke and mercurial French author Fred Vargas. Poetry? I've been meaning to re-read TS Eliot's Four Quartets this past year or more. There are also books I haven't finished yet, such as the latest from Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday). I'm doing an Open University course, so the coursework will also be coming. How many will I read? That depends on the weather. And I won't take any books I see as "worthy" or "hard work." It is supposed to be a holiday, after all.
Ian Rankin is a novelist
Literature
It's tempting to find an explanation for why Richard Yates has been overlooked as a mid-20th century American master in his author photo. With his careworn face and trimmed beard he offers neither the clean-shaven, let's-skip-town appeal of a Kerouac, nor the beardy-weirdy chic of a Ginsberg. His prose, too, eschews extremes, shunning both escapism and excess, and Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics)—published as part of a reissue of Yates's oeuvre—is the epitome of his style. In taut dialogue Yates charts the downfall of one John Wilder, who finds himself drinking too much as the strait-laced 1950s segue into the uncertain 1960s. Committed to the old normalcy, Wilder's friends and family can't—or won't—help him as his breakdown gathers unstoppable momentum. Yates tells the story straight, with no novelistic commentary or connective tissue, because none is needed. The protagonist mirrors his times: he is simply drowning in reality.
My book to beware of is also by Yates: his debut, Revolutionary Road, which is a great read, but almost certain to be grotesquely repackaged when the forthcoming film is released. Enjoy it while you can, before Leonardo DiCaprio's mug gets plastered all over the jacket.
Chris Cleave is a novelist
Politics
American presidential elections often throw up great works of journalism, from Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago to Theodore White's Making of the President series. But this election is peculiar because so far the only really good book associated with it is by one of the candidates, and was published 13 years ago.
Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father (Canongate) is a brilliantly written personal memoir. Obama has a novelist's command of written English, and sometimes his book reads like the work of someone observing the US from the outside. Because it was written before Obama's political career started, Dreams is a far more revealing book than his recent The Audacity of Hope.
The worst campaign book is Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism (Bantam). It is a ludicrous attempt to pin a Hitler moustache on American liberals in general and Hillary Clinton in particular. It is a sad commentary on the state of American conservatism that Goldberg's book made it to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs columnist at the Financial Times
Page-turners
Like holiday romances, there are page-turners that you rush into with a reckless euphoria but wish in retrospect you had never started, and those that delight and remain in the memory long after they're over. Mary Lawson's first novel Crow Lake (Vintage) is one of the latter. Set in her native Canada, it weaves in and out of the elegiacally remembered childhood and the past-haunted present of the narrator, trawling up a family tragedy. It is written in prose that draws you along like a fast, fresh stream. Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone—which I re-read every few years and each time stay up to see what's going to happen—is one the strangest, most uncanny of detective stories, narrated by an ensemble of curious and unreliable characters and full of doppelgängers, feverish nightmares and waking dreams. And finally, there's Carol-Ann Duffy's glorious book of linked poems, Rapture (Picador), which tells the story, often in broken sonnet form, of an affair, from the vulnerable hope of its beginning to the bleakness of its end. You read it from first intimate poem to the painful last, and then you go back to the start and read it again: what could be more of a page-turner than that?
Don't touch a word from the glut of books on suffering, which peddle the notion of heroism through victimhood. Avoid anything with a title like Why Mummy, Why?, No Daddy or Poor Little Me.
Nicci Gerrard is a writer
Mind and body
As a rule, I avoid books about the brain. We're told that neuroscience is one of the new frontiers of science, promising to answer profound questions about who we are, who we think we are and why we worry about who we think we are. Too often, it seems like a frontier in another sense: ramshackle, primitive and devoid of laws. It seems disturbingly easy to move from evidence of a bit of the brain "lighting up" with enhanced blood flow to some just-so story about our ancestors hunting on the savannah. But Oliver Sacks has never been interested in that kind of thing. His explorations of how brain malfunctions have bizarre behavioural manifestations are marked by humanity and wisdom. In Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Picador) he provides his trademark series of often surreal case histories that deepen our wonder at what the human brain can do. Like most of his books, you can read it like a novel.
If you think our species is about to "break the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieve inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress and longevity," you may be drawn to technology guru Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (Viking), the movie of which is forthcoming. But if its doorstop heft doesn't dissuade you from putting it in your holiday bag, maybe I can. Strictly for fantasists.
Philip Ball is a science writer and novelist
Poetry
Bernard O'Donoghue specialises in tiny well-turned narratives, seldom longer than a page, accomplished with humour that is melancholy but not sententious, and syntax, rhythm and vocabulary that are spot on but never self-conscious or pleased with themselves. His Selected Poems (Faber), which cherry-picks four earlier collections, shows him getting clearer and sharper and more compassionate as time goes by: attending closely to the natural world and our ageing selves as part of it, puzzled by bereavement, and "less at ease /Among the living than the dead." Wonderful.
You may think, dear Prospect reader, you don't have time for poetry. But how about making room for it by giving up newspapers? You may find it hard to imagine life without their vast acreage of adverts and self-regarding indignation, but try abstaining for one day and then the next: by the end of August you could find you no longer need them at all.
Jonathan Rée is a philosopher
History
There are many worthless books about the second world war, but recent years have also thrown up some gems, like Ian Kershaw's Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 (Penguin). What makes it so compelling is that Kershaw masterfully charts a course between inevitability and contingency. He shows how the choices that shaped the last half century—Churchill fighting on alone, Hitler invading the Soviet Union, Japan striking at Pearl Harbour, the Nazis adopting the final solution—were the products of ideological climates, political systems and power struggles that often went beyond the preferences of just one man. This is political history at its best.
By contrast, Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke (Simon & Schuster), covering the same period, is one of the worst books imaginable, because he deliberately distorts the historical record, taking incidents and remarks out of context and giving us an astonishingly one-sided version of the origins of the war. No book is ever a complete waste of time, but this one comes mighty close.
Dominic Sandbrook is a historian
Short stories
Your book and your holiday are engaged in a silent war for your attention, your memory, your soul. Most fiction tries to erase your holiday and replace it with artificial memories of places you've never been and people you've never met. What you need is a book which will enhance your holiday, make it more vivid, more memorable, not less. Jorge Luis Borges's Fictions (Penguin Classics) does the job perfectly. The places and people he describes are vivid, but as described by a man going blind. They will not replace the real people that you meet. The fictions are short—they will not take up much of your holiday. You can only read one, maybe two, at a time. But they will give a strange, uneasy glamour and interest to almost everything. The barber's look will be full of significance. The statue in the park will point to the dog star Sirius. The prices on the menu will sing Kabbalistic truths. Your copy of Borges's book will seem curiously unreal and hyper-real at the same time. You will always recall its cover, the table it sat on, the arrangement of the objects on the table, a mystic sign that never quite revealed itself. You will remember your holiday perfectly. But you will remember it as an extraordinary story in a book by Borges, a story that seems more real than life…
Julian Gough is a writer
Big ideas
Confronted with Islamist terrorism, British liberalism has undergone something of a crisis in recent years, and so now is the perfect time to venture further afield and get some air in your lungs. A good place to start is Olivier Roy's slim, elegant volume Secularism Confronts Islam (Columbia University Press), which dribbles neatly past all those huffy secularists on the one hand and those who think there is something necessarily progressive about Islam on the other.
Populated by hacks in search of a second political wind, the debate about Islam in Britain has recently assumed a sneering, whispery and rather paranoid tone. Roy, a French sociologist, reminds us that militant Islam is not as foreign as we think it is and that the nervy, swaggering secularism now being banded about is very far from the secular ideal. He successfully remakes the distinction between fundamentalism and terrorism, and the argument that religious fundamentalism of any stripe should have its place in any civilised society. As a Belfast Catholic who grew up skipping past Ian Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church on the way to school (during the glory day of Paisley's 'Save Ulster from Sodomy' Campaign), I can only agree.
On the other hand, I still can't fathom the triumphant success of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Put bluntly, it argues that contemporary societies systematically ignore high-impact, low-probability events (so-called "black swans") and should pay them more attention. If this was ever true, it makes little sense in a world in which we slip off our shoes at airport check-in in case one of our fellow passengers is carrying plastic explosives. If you must read it wait until after the holidays, when you're safely tucked up in your own bed.
James Harkin is a writer and ICA director of talks
Science
Carl Zimmer's Microcosm: E Coli and the New Science of Life (Pantheon Books) delivers what a science book should; it reveals the new and re-enchants the old. By looking at the process common to all life through the prism of an organism with no public persona to distract us—the bacterium Escherichia coli, uncomplaining workhorse of ten thousand laboratories, unobserved and mostly benign passenger in the guts of us all—he is able to draw out all sorts of implications form one of the 20th century's great discoveries. At the cellular level, a vast amount of what drives and allows life is the same the world over: as the molecular biologist Jacques Monod remarked, "What is true for E coli is true for the elephant." Yet, at the same time, E coli's world—in which bodily appendages take longer to make than the bodies they hang from, and where, when pricked, the living do not bleed but explode—is oddly intense in its own particularities.
Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible (Allen Lane): not so much. Thirteen years ago Lawrence M Krauss's Physics of Star Trek (Basic Books) both founded the microgenre of science fictional tropes used to introduce real physics and more or less exhausted its potential. This book adds little, and is at times misleading to boot. If you want science fictional explorations of weirdness and wonder, why not just read some weird and wonderful science-filled science fiction such as that of Charles Stross or Vernor Vinge. If you want thoughts about how science fiction and the real world interact, try the dyspeptic and perceptive The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of by Thomas M Disch (Simon & Schuster). If you want some science fiction not particularly heavy on the science but remarkably accomplished, try Disch's novels. If I get away I'll be taking his On Wings of Song with me.
Disch died by his own hand in New York on 4th July, aging, bereaved and in fear of eviction.
Oliver Morton is a science writer
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