What To Read On Your Summer Vacation |

The great thing about travel in the age of the eBook is that you don’t need to limit yourself to just one or two or five lightweight paperbacks. No more second-guessing the reading tastes of your future self! No more packing My Brilliant Friend, only to realize once you’re on the plane that you really wanted 1Q84. (No more not packing 1Q84 just because it’s 928 pages long.) Now, you can plan for up to thirty contingencies without taking up any space in your carry-on, leaving you room to pack (for once) your raincoat, which turns out to be good if (say) you’re going to Holland, where it rains the whole time.

But I digress. The question is, what books do you pack when you can be as greedy as you want? A few suggestions:

A Book to Fend Off Homesickness: You know that sooner or later an unfamiliar transit system or the arcane symbols on a foreign bank machine may send you into a brief miserable tailspin. When that happens, make sure that you have at least one book (or why not three?) that makes you feel at home.
	A Thriller: Who are you kidding? You love thrillers; they’re thrilling. Anything with “Girl” in the title and a murky, sinister cover will do: Gone Girl, the Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl on the Train. So why not this: Two freshly traumatized girls move, with their mother, to a home on an idyllic park in central London. Shortly thereafter, one of them turns up unconscious in the rose garden. Are some of the friendly new neighbours a little too friendly? Or not friendly enough? What about their estranged relatives? Whodunnit? Who didn’t?
A Rock-and-Roll Memoir There are so many intriguing ones out there: Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless, Elvis Costello’s Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Motley Crue’s The Dirt (not judging). And perhaps best of all – to Riot Grrls (of a certain age) and Portlandia fans, at least – Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, by the great Carrie Brownstein. Will reading this give you the power to swagger like another female Keith Richards? There’s only one way to find out.
	Some Light Nonfiction Did you know that New York eccentric Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven may have been the true inspiration behind the Dada movement? Or that the founder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was also an occultist bent on destroying the world? Now you do.
Something Controversial Let’s say you’re going to Europe on vacation, and you want to bring along a book that you can discuss with your hosts. Is Houllebecq’s latest, about a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the French government, scathing satire fed by a deep vein of feminism? Or is it straight-up hate literature? However you read it, it’s certainly a way into discussing the current malaise.