Summer's easy readers

COLIN MOORE unfolds the deckchair, cracks a tinnie and settles down with a not quite so good book.

A bedside cabinet at our family bach contains several hefty tomes.

There is an anthology of the mountain travel books of Himalayan pioneer H.W. Tilman and another of the mountain travel books of Eric Shipton who took a young Kiwi called Edmund Hillary along on a reconnaissance of climbing Mt Everest from Nepal.

They are heavy volumes, which is why they were taken to the bach a few years ago. You need time to enjoy books like this and other, similarly thick books left in this cabinet.

Holidays should provide such time, but they never do, do they? My weighty tomes have been there for a few years and remain largely untouched. Perhaps I should feel guilty about ignoring the opportunity to read but summer holidays are no time to feel guilty about anything.

The fact is that lazing at the bach is probably not the environment to tackle travel anthologies. Or Karl Marx, War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov.

Let's just say that a surfeit of wine or beer and Christmas turkey is likely to make you nod off before you get past the prologue.

Even a finely written, racy novel can cause holiday problems. How do you mix a book that you can't put down with fishing, swimming, or a game of golf?

My wife solves the dilemma by taking a box full of Mills and Boon books from a secondhand store. It's a sort of mental chewing gum with the great advantage that you can complete a volume between a late lunch and sundowners and when you finish the books in the box you can start all over again because you are never quite sure what you have already read.

Magazines are a good old holiday standby for much the same reason. So long as you don't bother to check the date on the cover you will never know just how old a magazine is, even if Princess Diana is on the cover.

Travel books are different, which is odd in a way. There you may be, lounging in a spot of New Zealand paradise, reading about Tibet, or Mauritania, or Patagonia. It's almost perverse.

But it is nonetheless the perfect compromise - at least so long as the book is not a mountaineering anthology.

Summer days are dreamers' days and travel books are for dreamers. Where better than to dream of the Antarctic or the tribulations of Charlie Douglas as he explored the rugged west coast of New Zealand in the late 19th century than from your holiday deckchair?

If the sun is bright you may think of a spell under the Tuscan sun or perhaps dream of the wind in your face motorcycling through New Zealand.

So this week we present some holiday reading options. Few will tax your attention spans - which is the way it should be - but all will keep your dreams alive until we return on January 16.