Pack a punch

Even when you have children in tow, you can get a surprising amount of reading done on holiday. It is all very well buying the latest airport blockbuster (sometimes these can be of high enough quality to be purchased with only a small amount of shame), but why not use the time, and the strangely increased appetite for reading, to try something more improving?

The most gratifying principle to follow is that of setting. On honeymoon, in Venice, I found a beautiful edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, smaller than a pocket diary and printed on biblically thin paper; it proved surprisingly robust. Incorporating his vocabulary into holiday requests for lodging or food can raise eyebrows; but it has sometimes garnered me a free drink or even, on one occasion, a meal. If your Italian is anything like mine you're not going to get everything, but a pocket dictionary will help, and a crib in your room for afterwards. So what if a lot of it goes over your head? It's not as though you're taking an exam.

Also in Italy, I read Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers (Vintage Classics, £8.99), the most modern classic I will allow here, simply on the grounds that it is the ideal holiday book: long, immensely entertaining, full of incident, and exotic. You already feel as if you're travelling when you read it. I was in the company of an Italian homophobe and Catholicism-hater; I relished his expression when I told him that the two chief elements of the work were homosexuality and Catholicism.

For anywhere in Europe, but particularly Italy and Hungary, read Antál Szerb's Journey by Moonlight (translated by Len Rix, Pushkin Press, £6.99), which manages the extraordinary trick of being both funny and deep at the same time; everyone who reads this book falls in love with it. You will, too.

For those of you who have the good fortune to be holidaying in North Wales, I would suggest the sturdy OUP hardback edition of Sir Thomas Malory; surprisingly easy to read after five centuries, and steeped in atmosphere. If you can't face that, enjoy TH White's modernised take on it, The Once and Future King (Voyager, £9.99), notionally a children's book but filled with wisdom, humour and, occasionally, outrageous gruesomeness: the description of Morgause boiling a cat alive is one of the 20th century's most extraordinary passages of literature.