I’ve never been one of those people who can plough through a great big literary doorstopper on holiday. I take one with me, every time, and every time I bring it back unread. The bookmark is always, faithfully, somewhere around page 37.
What I actually read on holiday, if I’m honest, is whatever’s lying around. The dog-eared paperback somebody else left on the apartment bookshelf. A poem on my phone over a coffee. The back of an HP Sauce bottle at breakfast. (You learn a lot from the back of an HP Sauce bottle.)
And, increasingly, picture books. Out loud. To whoever will let me.
The truth about big holiday books:
There’s a particular kind of book you buy specifically for the airport. It has a glossy cover. It’s the size of a small house brick. The author’s name is bigger than the title. You buy it imagining yourself, lightly tanned, sipping a cold something on a lounger, fully immersed in a tense Scandinavian crime thriller.
Reader, this is a lie we tell ourselves:
What actually happens on holiday is this: you read the first 30 pages on the plane, you fall asleep on chapter four by the pool, you forget who any of the characters are by day three, you start a fight with your partner over the air conditioning, you pick the book up again on the flight home, you read another 15 pages, and then you put it on the bookshelf at home where it lives for the next eleven years, judging you silently.
I have at least four of these books in my house. Two of them have the bookmark still in. I am very fond of them and will never read them.
The kind of book that actually works on holiday:
Here’s what I’ve learned, in my twilight years, about what actually gets read on a holiday:
Short things. Things you can finish before the family wakes up. Things you can read aloud over a glass of wine on a terrace. Things you can read more than once and find something new in. Poetry, if you’re in the right mood. Short stories. Letters. The occasional very good picture book that’s secretly for grown-ups, too.
My last collection was called Life Gets in the Way, which is, among other things, a very honest title for a book of poems that people might read on holiday. Life does get in the way. Especially on holiday. Especially when there are kids, or grandkids, or a partner who keeps wanting to go and look at a different cathedral.
The books that work are the ones that fit into the gaps.
Reading aloud, and why grown-ups need it too:
One of the loveliest things I’ve done in the past few years has been visiting primary schools to read my picture books to children, reception to year 2, mostly. My Magical Bearded Friend, and Maude’s Magical Ear Trumpet. The kids sit cross-legged on the carpet, and I do the voices, and they shout out the rhymes, and we have an absolutely smashing time.
Here’s what nobody told me before I started doing this: the teachers love it as much as the children.
Adults don’t get read to. Not since they were small. And there is something, I can’t quite put my finger on it, about being read to, even as a grown-up, that takes you straight back to being four years old in a warm room with somebody who loved you, and the whole world being safe for the next ten minutes.
Holidays, I think, are a chance to give that back to the people in your life. Particularly the small ones. Particularly the ones who don’t get it often enough.
Read to your kids on the beach. Read to your grandkids on the apartment balcony. Read a poem out loud at the dinner table and don’t apologise for it. Read your nephew the funny bit from the book in your hand and watch his face.
If you only read one book on your holiday this year, and that book is a picture book that takes seven minutes to get through, you have not failed at reading. You have, in fact, done the most important kind of it.
My holiday reading list (such as it is):
If you want my actual recommendations, here’s what I’d take in a suitcase for a week away:
One slim poetry collection. Anything by Mary Oliver if you want to feel quietly mended by the end of the week. Anything by Wendy Cope if you want to laugh. One of mine, if you’re feeling generous.
One book of short stories. Short stories are the unsung heroes of holiday reading. You can finish one in a sitting, feel like you’ve achieved something, and go back to your G&T with a clear conscience.
One picture book per small person travelling with you. Honestly. Pack them. They weigh nothing, and they save your sanity at bedtime in an unfamiliar room with itchy sheets and a ceiling fan that clicks.
And one notebook. Because the best thing about a holiday isn’t always what you read. Sometimes it’s what you write. A line you overheard at the next table. The colour of the sea at 6 am. The thing your mum said to your dad in the airport that you’d forgotten she used to say.
My poems nearly all started as scrappy notes in notebooks I’d forgotten I owned.
One last thing:
If you take just one picture book on holiday this summer, for the grandkids, for the niece and nephew, for the small person you might be lucky enough to read to in a quiet five minutes between a beach and a dinner, I’d love it to be one of mine.
Not because it’ll change anyone’s life. It won’t. It’s a little book about a little old lady in a yellow coat who’s given a strange old trumpet by her doctor.
But it might, for seven and a half minutes, make a small person feel listened to. Which is, I suspect, what they actually want from a holiday, far more than another ice cream.
About Maude’s Magical Ear Trumpet:
If your suitcase has room for a small, kind picture book this summer, I’d be honoured if it were this one.
Maude’s Magical Ear Trumpet is my picture book about an older lady in a bright yellow coat and a pink and yellow spotted hat, who is given a strange old trumpet by her doctor. When she puts it to her ear, it tells her how people really feel. The butcher who says he’s fine but isn’t. The daughter who says nothing’s wrong, but everything is. The friend in the cafe is carrying something quietly. And in the end, of course, the trumpet turns out not to be magic at all; Maude was the magic the whole time.
It’s a story for children aged roughly 4 to 8, but I think you’ll find it’s also a story for the grown-up reading it aloud.
👉 Buy Maude’s Magical Ear Trumpet on Amazon
If you do read it, drop me a line and tell me what you thought. I read every message. That’s the Maude in me, I suppose.
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