Fun in the sun ... A student relaxes with a book in a Cambridge park. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA
Summer's just about here, which means that it's time for "summer reading". For most people I know this means light, entertaining fare that goes well with lying on the beach or sitting in the park, or will help pass the hours spent on a plane or a train heading for one's holiday destination. Perhaps I'm a bit antisocial, or maybe just wired wrong, as more than a few people have told me, but my reading tastes tend to gravitate in the exact opposite direction during these warmer months. By mid-June I've often found myself mired in some impossibly long and ridiculously heavy tome that goes about as well with a day in the sun as an overcoat or a pair of wool mittens.
And it gets worse, folks. Not only do I like to subvert my summers with lengthy books, but my preferences in this area run hard towards what I like to call "fat classics" - great doorstops of supposedly unassailable brilliance such as War and Peace, Les Misérables and The Brothers Karamazov.
This hobby of mine over the years has led to some pretty odd looks, as well as the occasional snide remark, from those who can't fathom why anyone would like to spend a summer mired in a Russian winter. For me, though, these warm months have always meant freedom - freedom from school, the family obligations of the winter holidays, heavy clothing, and the feelings of gloom and existential angst imposed by continuous days of low, cold, rainy skies. As a lover of the written word I can see no better use for this freedom than taking on a long, challenging piece of literary art.
Over the last few years, though, I must admit that I've fallen out of my fat classics routine, mainly because I've been trying to earn some extra money teaching college summer classes. I've been feeling the itch to get back to it, though; there are several of these books sitting on my "to read" shelf that lately seem to be calling my name quite incessantly. Besides, as an obsessive literati, I can't stand the fact that if I kick the bucket today I will have died having read nothing by Sir Walter Scott or either Brontë sister, and only the first book of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy.
Though sometimes I feel very much like a loner with my summer reading habits, I can't believe there aren't at least a few more people out there like me who enjoy diving headfirst into similarly deep literary waters this time of year. If so, who are you and what are you going to read this summer? What have you read in summers past? What fat classics do you know about that the rest of us might have missed? And perhaps most importantly, which of these books in reality falls far short of their reputation and should be avoided? Come my fellow summer book nerds - let us rejoice and unite!
