Jacques Strauss's Blog - Posts Tagged "reads"
Choosing a holiday book
Richard and I are having our annual holiday fight. We are both reacting against the holidays inflicted upon on us in childhood. His parents would always rent a nice holiday home on the North Coast or stay in a nice hotel in Durban. It was always very civilised. For this reason, Richard thinks camping is marvellous. Richard thinks there could be nothing, absolutely nothing quite so nice as spending a week camping in some God forsaken shit-hole. My parents love God forsaken-shit holes. The more forsaken and the shittier, the better.
‘Can we go to the seaside this holiday, mom?’
‘Yes honey, we are going to the seaside.’
‘We’re going to Durban!’
‘Even better – we’re going camping near Mozambique. It will take us about 25 hours to drive there. The roads are very, very bad. But you father says we don’t need a four-wheel drive. We’ll be taking tents, and mosquito nets and malaria pills and flares and first aid kits and water purifiers. It will be lovely!’
It was on one of our family holidays at Sodwana that I read ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was the singularly most gratifying reading experience I’ve ever had and not only because I was twelve at the time I read it but because I read it in a jungle. That experience developed into a two-year obsession with the book which culminated in a stage adaptation that I wrote, directed and starred in with my friends. Most exciting of all, we had to get permission from Faber & Faber (in London – a very big deal you must understand, to colonial yokels) to stage the play at the annual repertory festival. Faber was very gracious indeed. (To this day I can’t look at a Faber book without smiling and thinking, ‘Damn they were so nice.’)
Anyway, the point is, choosing holiday books is a big deal. It can affect the very course of your life. You have this one-off opportunity to experience a book in a way you otherwise never would. I am always trying to recreate my ‘Lord of the flies’ experience: the perfect book, at the perfect time, in the perfect place. So with this in mind I have decided to (1) stop fighting with Richard about his more exotic holiday suggestions (2) buy all holiday books at Daunt because of their unique and rather brilliant way of arranging fiction by country and continent.
‘Can we go to the seaside this holiday, mom?’
‘Yes honey, we are going to the seaside.’
‘We’re going to Durban!’
‘Even better – we’re going camping near Mozambique. It will take us about 25 hours to drive there. The roads are very, very bad. But you father says we don’t need a four-wheel drive. We’ll be taking tents, and mosquito nets and malaria pills and flares and first aid kits and water purifiers. It will be lovely!’
It was on one of our family holidays at Sodwana that I read ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was the singularly most gratifying reading experience I’ve ever had and not only because I was twelve at the time I read it but because I read it in a jungle. That experience developed into a two-year obsession with the book which culminated in a stage adaptation that I wrote, directed and starred in with my friends. Most exciting of all, we had to get permission from Faber & Faber (in London – a very big deal you must understand, to colonial yokels) to stage the play at the annual repertory festival. Faber was very gracious indeed. (To this day I can’t look at a Faber book without smiling and thinking, ‘Damn they were so nice.’)
Anyway, the point is, choosing holiday books is a big deal. It can affect the very course of your life. You have this one-off opportunity to experience a book in a way you otherwise never would. I am always trying to recreate my ‘Lord of the flies’ experience: the perfect book, at the perfect time, in the perfect place. So with this in mind I have decided to (1) stop fighting with Richard about his more exotic holiday suggestions (2) buy all holiday books at Daunt because of their unique and rather brilliant way of arranging fiction by country and continent.
