At last, a list ...

... (sort of) that is genuinely interesting: Writers and critics recommend the best holiday reads. (A special tip of the hat to Vikram Johri.)

Noteworthy picks include Simon Callow's: "Dedalus have been steadily printing the novels of the astonishing 19th-century French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (notorious for the masterpiece of decadence, Against the Grain) and as a bonus have reissued Robert Baldick's classic biography, one of the most elegant, stimulating and moving of all literary biographies ..."

And John Gray's: "John Cowper Powys's Wolf Solent (Penguin Modern Classics) is one of the great 20th-century novels, and despite having read it many times I'll read it again. Powys renders the flow of human consciousness with a subtlety some have compared with Proust; but this is Proust out of doors in a magically transformed English landscape." Right on, John!