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Posted
Friday, October 09, 2009 12:15 PM
| By
Troy Patterson
The paradigmatic vacation-place library combines a best-seller archive, a storage bin, a lost-and-found office, a remainder table, and a graveyard of high aspirations. Good detective novels rub covers with bad Booker Prize-winners. All the beach books of recent decades wash up on these shores—too much Ludlum and not enough Danielle Steel and the perennial Bonfire of the Vanities. There should be a complete Uncle Wiggily for the kids and a dog-eared Fear of Flying for teens. In the matter of literary fiction, expect maybe a misguided Updike purchase (Brazil), a Song of Solomon (with a caution-tape-yellow "used" sticker), maybe even a minor classic worth stealing (Nightwood). Note the William F. Buckley spy novel on the lower left, sending just the right message: escapist but classy. No such collection is complete without some local-color stuff, be it a dairy-farm memoir or a coffee-table number, The Historic Lighthouses of Kansas, say.
Remember this: The fancier the lodgings, the schlockier the shelves, a rule that follows from an observation on in-flight reading made by Martin Amis in The Information:
In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. As for Business World...they were reading trex: outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tublike tinglers: escape from the pressures facing the contemporary entrepreneur. ... And then [Richard] pitched up in the intellectual slum of First Class, among all its drugged tycoons, and the few books lying unregarded on softly swelling stomachs were jacketed with hunting scenes or ripe young couples in mid swirl or swoon. They all lay there flattened out in the digestive torpor of midafternoon, and nobody was reading anything—except for a lone seeker who gazed, with a frown of mature skepticism, at a perfume catalogue. Jesus, what happened on the Concorde?
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