All of Germany is on vacation. Only in one western town does a woman sit at her desk and have to write a humorous text about summer and books. The weather in Cologne fits perfectly, 24 degrees. Only the sea is missing. But when the wind is wrong, the highway roars. Can you just about pass as a sea substitute. A friend disturbs the concentration with a text message. She is planning a holiday in Denmark and asks for book tips. “Five quarters of an hour to the sea” I suggest to her.
A second message came four days later: “We left for Lübeck two and a half hours ago, I’ve already read 70 pages, I can’t stop.” In this case it’s a shame, because the story of Ernest van der Kwast only has almost 100 pages. In any case, there is a simple rule for holiday books: you only read them when you are sitting by the sea or lying on an alpine meadow.
Summer books are like eating ice cream. Just not all at once. Otherwise a feeling of fullness, which is unlikely, however, because Germans tend to read very little on vacation. Unfortunately, I can’t avoid gender at this point. The Germans are already reading. She packs at least two novels for her vacation. Not only German readers are hot for books. Marilyn Monroe had more than 400 copies in her possession, Madonna is not without. “Everyone thinks I’m totally crazy about sex. The truth is, I’d rather read a book,” she once said.
The book recommendations of the celebrities could not be more different. There are novels that only come in a double pack, in a slipcase. In plain language this means: excess baggage. Perhaps that’s why we should judge summer books best by their weight. category 1: light; the next level: intermediate. What would still help me as a guide: difficult to illegible.
If you lie on the beach with a slipcase, you definitely make a good picture. I remember a holiday in Italy where a friend who later wasn’t one anymore was standing knee-deep in the Mediterranean Sea with a book. Looked nice, the book, a volume of poetry by Jean Racine, had been bought second-hand. I would have liked to have decorated myself with something extraordinary back then, but that would have been intellectually overwhelming. I tried Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” while on vacation. To fool passers-by into a world that wasn’t mine at all, or at least that I didn’t completely fill. Others read crime fiction by Fitzek, while Westermann reads the novel by a Nobel Prize winner for literature. She’s probably got it. Incidentally, the book has around 1000 pages, opened in the middle and pressed wide, it protects better than any pair of sunglasses. In any case, the question is how long this can continue to work with holiday books. Who still wants to read when it’s 40 degrees on the beach?
Summer books always feel like there is something sky blue about them, you can quickly recognize them by their exterior. This year, almost a dozen of the current novels, which easily pass as holiday books, show pool water in its most beautiful shades of blue on the cover, surrounded by women in colorful bathing suits. This proves in an impressive way how much imagination the marketing experts have. Smart women like to swim, and smart people buy books.
British author Julian Barnes has decided to spend his life only reading books that look good on the bedside table. If you die unexpectedly. If you’re still enjoying life and want to be on vacation, you have to keep going. So what do I put on the lounger by the hotel pool at five in the morning: a towel or a summer book? And what is gone first?
