HOLIDAY READING

During the 11 days we spent on Bornholm, I had no computer, and didn't go on the internet. I did, on the other hand, do a lot of reading. Three whole books, plus some Alice Munro short stories, and the first two hundred or so pages of a reread of War and Peace, some 2,000+ pages in all.

If that sounds as if I was rather anti-social, I wasn't. There was one day when it rained, and we stayed indoors reading, but otherwise it was fantastic weather and there were activities pretty much every day. What I realised was how much time I normally waste looking at screens and/or listening to "news", and how effective you can be if you (say) read during the hour between getting up at 8am and having breakfast at 9am (when our children woke up). I mentally made a note to try to do more reading and less screen-gazing in the future.

And the three books? I am Pilgrim, a crappy doorstop thriller; Return of a King, William Dalrymple's excellent account of the first Afghan War in the 1840's; and the equally excellent, albeit very different, A Death in the Family by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard. Further posts on the latter two in due course.

Walter Blotscher