The waywardness of the holiday reader

I boarded the plane at the start of the hols with lists of Books That Must Be Read Now That I have The Time and stepped off QF139 a month later with a suitcase full of Books That Popped Up Quite By Chance. Here’s how it happened:

Even though my hand luggage contained a perfectly good aeroplane read, still the lure of Sydney Airport book store was too great to resist and I emerged with a book that I bought mainly because I love the cover and it has a compelling first sentence: “Arthur Dreyfuss liked big breasts.” It’s Gregoire Delacourt’s latest novel: the first thing you see and it turned out to be a perfect holiday read about looking beneath the surface – for the first thing you see isn’t always what you’d hoped to get.

I met my second holiday read in a bookshop attached to a café in my hometown – Durban. There is a happy sentence if ever there was one. It was a complete impulse buy, written by an author I’d never heard of (turns out it’s her first novel), with tennis (a game I deeply loathe) as a major theme, and about three sisters (I don’t even have one). Yet its siren call sucked me in, all within the space of a single cappuccino. The book is The Carriage House by Louisa Hall. Don’t be put off by the cover of the library copy, it is a great little holiday read.

My third little find was at a local market in a small town on the west coast of South Africa at a second-hand book stall where, to my amazement, I spotted a book that more than one male colleague had recommended to me. (I have no idea why they would do this, as I have never ridden a bicycle in my life!) Gironimo by Tim Moore is the author’s reaction to the Lance Armstrong debacle which motivated Moore to redress the imbalance and do something totally authentic for cycling – ride the notorious 1914 Giro d’Italia (wearing period clothing) on a gearless, wooden-wheeled 1914 road bike:

What unfolds is the tale of one decrepit crock trying to ride another up a thousand lonely hills, then down them with only wine corks for brakes

So, like all good holidays, I started in one place and ended up somewhere completely different. I went with the flow. I was in the zone. And I had a terrific time.

Now back to my lists!

In which Katherine indulges her weakness for Lord Byron

It is always a great feeling to discover a book that you didn’t really know anything about before you picked it up and find that you can’t put it down. Recently a new book, Lady Helen and the Dark Days Club caught my eye. The synopsis looked promising – young adult urban fantasy set in Regency London, and it involved Lord Byron (always a plus in my book).

I simply could not put it down, yet at the same time I didn’t want it to finish – the curse of many a good book. The plot isn’t terribly original (sparky heroine discovers she has special powers and is introduced to a secret supernatural underworld), there are many familiar tropes (tortured, but dashingly attractive Byronic hero etc), but the quality of the writing and the attention to period detail – such as the inclusion of the real life assassination of the British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval – in the setting make for an excellent read.

Young adult urban fantasy is an extremely popular genre (see Twilight, Fallen, Vampire Academy etc, as is Georgian / Regency fiction like Georgette Heyer, and Jane Austen and her imitators, so it is kind of fun for an author to mash up these genres to create something that is both familiar and fresh. And which uses words like ‘gallivanting’ and ‘fornication’.