Summer reading: So much to do, so little time

My bookshelves are groaning under the weight of worthy tomes I've picked up at school fairs and haven't yet got around to reading, but these holidays I hope to finish (and will, surely, seeing it's a novella) Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

It has one of the best opening sentences ever: "One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a Californian real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."

I'll also be reading a lot of non-fiction: The Face of War, a collection of Martha Gellhorn's Spanish Civil War and World War II journalism; John Saker's ode to basketball, Tracing the Arc, which gets my vote as the most enjoyable essay from the Montana series; and descriptions of baroque schemes one man dreamed up to smuggle cocaine from Colombia to the United States in the 1970s in the classic Snowblind by Robert Sabbag.

However, my old holiday favourites are Wellingtonian Heather Marshall's comedies of family dynamics, The Secret Diary of a Telephonist and A Nest of Cuckoos; Gillian Bradshaw's Byzantine-era historical novels; Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries; and vintage Tom Clancy.

And I do mean vintage, mind, before the Cold War slipped through Clancy's fingers and his gung-ho gibberishness wasn't edited out of ridiculous plots about contemporary India and Japan versus the Americans. When the suspension of disbelief and resistance to patriotic propaganda takes that much effort, you may as well be at work.

* Janet McAllister is a canvas staff writer