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Anna Karenina on the beach, The Corrections in Patagonia, Death in Venice overlooking the Lido ... Writers recall their memorable holiday reads - what are yours?

Geoff Dyer

I bought Theodor Adorno 's Minima Moraliain June 1986 by Compendium in Camden, London (Mecca, then the theory-hungry free radicals) and read it, with interruptions during the summer in Brixton. Given the diversity of this "Reflections on Damaged Life" - put together in the molten core of the 20th Century - it 's not surprising that what I remember is less the specific content of the book as the experience of reading it, the current coursing through the pages. Dialectical thinking - 'an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means, but because it must use these means, it is at every moment in danger of acquiring a compelling character \. " - If taken to extremes, that aesthetics (the first section is "For Marcel Proust ') as well as cerebral. Needless to say, I was able to 'understand t, all of it; still can' \ t to be honest, but this passage really means, more than they did 25 years ago: "are slippers designed to be inserted without the help of the out of hand. They are monuments of hate to stoop to. "

Jennifer Egan

I read Donna Tartt 's The Secret History

A Dance to the Music of Time

, and my first acquaintance with one of the most wonderful books I've ever come across,

Anna Karenina

, and on the urging of the friend who had recommended that, I began

John Gray

I can 't remember exactly when or where I first read John Cowper Powys' s Wolf Solent from cover to cover. I remember the book with me on a summer trip along the California coast, about 30 years ago, and completely absorbed in it, while standing on a cliff north of San Francisco. Few places have the rest wild, coast, and yet I found myself to Powys 's protagonists back to the fields and hedgerows of the West Country - part of the world that I barely knew at the time. The imaginative intensity with which the Powys landscape in which he (the book he wrote while living in upstate New York) had almost wiped out once again presented the beauty of the place I come to been seen.

Powys came to his life as seen by a collector of memories. Like his character Solent, "he chased her like a mad botanist, as a crazed butterfly collector '. To preserve those that have been Powys / Solent pursued more like Proust 's distilled sensations, the moments of natural beauty and poetry of the human, consumed by the time - not any memories. The novel tells how Solent returns to his Dorset home, where he finds himself lost in a maze of family secrets and complex relationships. He has never gives out of the maze, but on the way he collected a cache of memories - torn leaves, rain-soaked roads, banked-up clouds, "casual little things" a substantial and durable than the external events of his life. Contained in a number of battered paperbacks, Powys \ ve done since this summer, 30-odd years' s brilliant to have many other almost-forgotten rides I \ lit ".

The Admirable Crichton

Andrew Motion

The Odyssey at Ithaca. Whenever I looked up from the side, I saw the ruins of Odysseus 's Palace (so called), the beach, where he finally landed, the empty cave, where his cult flourished once described the barren rocky hills in the poem - and also saw myth and reality staggering upset.

Joseph O 'Connor

When I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a tattered copy of a novel she loved. I read it on vacation this summer in Connemara. The encounter with the first set of JD Salinger 's The Catcher in the Rye was like waking up in a new world. "If you really want to hear about it, is the first thing you 'll probably want to know where I was born and what my lousy childhood looked, and how my parents were occupied and all before me, and everything don David Copperfield kind of crap, but I 't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. "There was never occurred to me that someone with such a joy to write-causing fatigue. It was like hearing Bob Dylan and the Sex Pistols for the first time

She felt Holden was talking with you - perhaps you alone - and that your answers were somehow a part of history. She even felt he was listening. That was something special as a friendship-fiction claim. I go to every three or four summers, the next thing in my life a pilgrimage, and whenever I do, I 'm reading a different novel, but as fresh and funny and oddly irritating as the book that was connected to the lights of my youth.

Jonathan Raban

Venice, the end of the summer of 1971. Not really, because the holiday was New Statesman asked me to fill in their regular film critic (John Coleman, the dehydration of some alcoholic clinic) at the film festival. My hotel room on the Lido was small and hot. He was filled with mosquitoes, if the window was open, and reeked of insecticide when it was closed. I've read Death in Venice For the first time, and the second and the third and fourth. The smell of Flit, or what ever it was turned into the disinfectant stench of the city in a cholera epidemic, as I said in the Von Aschenbach, guilty of the boy Tadzio enchants on. I neglected my movie-going tasks, in Thomas Mann 's Venice, a world so much alive that the real thing to be poor shadow seemed to be alive. Remember I can 't, a movie that I saw, but the book remains a touchstone. I wouldn 't read it in Venice, though, if I wanted to hide in my surroundings, more secure and to keep it for a wet Sunday afternoon in, say, Catford or Slough.

Ian Rankin

A few years back went, my wife and I holiday in Kenya. Her brother was working in Nairobi and arranged for a week "Safari" to us. No newspapers or laptop or cell phone signal, no TV or radio - we would be camping. I knew I needed a nice long book with me (as well as a torch) to take. I chose War and Peace. It had been sitting unread on my bookshelves a few years. I started reading it on the flight over and was soon engrossed. It was a random value of the book, but - as we lay in the tent in 30-degree heat, I would read the descriptions winter Miranda. It has become our virtual "air con". (The book was also useful for crushing insects Bitey.) 'T think it' I don \ s the largest that has ever written - there 's too much concentration on the "haves" and nothing about the disenfranchised. But it was a good choice of book for Kenya in the heat.

Will Self

When I was 18 I took a bus to Lisbon - They are used in order to do this again in the day. Magic Bus by a dusty parking lot next to Gloucester Road underground - I think it cost 25 pounds. I had an army surplus duffel bag, some hash hidden in a toothpaste tube - she took near the end of the tube with plyers, pushed into the dope, then rolled it up, as if it was used by half - and John Fowles 's The Magus . I 'd like Fowles' s other books ( The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Collector, and so on), although they do not exactly consider them as members of the literary bon ton - more, I think what today would be a \ are called "Guilty Pleasure '. Anyway, go out on the bus, for those of us was waaay uncomfortable - but Fowles has done its job, thwarted the bumps and lozenges. I can not forget 't that much about it except that they all have some young, romantic, sex-obsessed man, and as was his cruel and useless treatment of a beautiful girl - in the Father Ted sense – was punished by the eponymous Magus with a series of real-life psycho-dramas staged in the Cyclades. It was – if I remember rightly – one of those books with huge narrative pulsion, and I couldn't stop reading. I read to the Channel, I read on the ferry, I read south on the autoroute, I read through the Pyrenees, I read through Spain. I arrived in Lisbon and read all night in a fleapit hotel. I entrained for the south and read on the train. I arrived at the Algarve and walked along a cliff, reading. I got the toothpaste tube out, unrolled it, got out the hash, skinned up, lit up, and finished the book on a high that then plummeted. There I was: not in the Cyclades being punished for sexual amorality, but in Portugal being approached by a German hippy for a toke. A German hippy who then strummed "Stairway to Heaven" on his guitar and suggested I sing along.

Tom Stoppard

About 50 years ago, I have two books by Edmund Wilson on a solo trip to Spain by rail, bus and thumb. One of the books was Classics and advertising , A thick collection of book reviews. The other was Axel 's Castle , Long term papers on "the makers of modern literature". Wilson remains the best critics for me. I missed a lot of Spain on the way to Gibraltar, for hours on my bed and read instead of looking around. I 've forgotten all about my trip only ever bitten by bedbugs in Wilson and from Algeciras.

Colm T?ib?n

I have the book still. I wrote a date on the title page: July 1972. I got a summer job as a barman in the Grand Hotel in Tramore in County Waterford that summer, when I was 17. I was the worst barman who ever lived. My pints of Guinness were unholy. Even the vodkas I poured (and vodka was all the rage in Tramore than summer) had something wrong with them. I worked from six in the evening to two in the morning. I spent the fine days on the big long beach. My copy of The Essential Hemingway has colored pages with sea water. I've read The Sun Also Rises on that beach in Tramore and I read the great Hemingway short stories for the first time. It made me dream about going to Spain, but it also gave me something else – an idea of prose as something glamorous, smart and shaped, and the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences.

Rose Tremain

In 1967, the year I left university I spent most of the summer in an isolated house in Corsica, built over a deep, winding river. I used to spend hours with this river, reading, sunbathing and swimming and I wonder where my life was headed.

The book, which I was reading Patrick White 's Voss , The charts the journey of a German exile in the Australian Outback unmapped in the 1840s. Voss runs deeper than in the boundless wilderness, cause of any trouble this arid terrain to humans can pursue, he struggles to understand the nature of his sudden love for Laura Trevelyan, an orphaned young woman shunned by society for their stubborn wisdom. To increase even as Voss moved further and further away from Laura, with little hope of return, his dreams of "normal" domestic happiness and lightness.

This tension - between the solitary travel and the longing for love and companionship - that makes this book as a masterpiece. And in 1967, before I had written something worth publishing, but already hurting, but to be successful writers, I understand that these conflicting desires are the focus of most writers 'life and would lie at the heart of me.

Sarah Waters

My first adult trip was in 1987: my girlfriend and I had just finished our finals and wanted to celebrate with a budget trip to somewhere sunny. By chance we have for Dubrovnik - and it was a wonderful, unforgettable trip to Dubrovnik, there 's hot stone streets and blue sea that pop into my head whenever I hear the word "Summer". The book I have been an unforgettable experience, to: John Fowles 's The Magus . With its lively Greek island setting was an ideal holiday read, and at 21 I was just the perfect age for them, because it 'sa book about the terrible arrogance, but also the wonderful vulnerability of youth.

Re-reading the novel, recently I was struck by their essential craziness, and by his deep dubious sexual politics. But I was still taken and impressed: Fowles is a fabulous storyteller, and The Magus is brilliant twisty and the children, with some really creepy moments. It 's one of the few novels I' ve read that surprised me gasping for air. I 'd recommend it as an interesting read, for a holiday or for any time.

Compiled by Ginny Hooker.