Lost for words

It's time to head to a Greek island with a suitcase filled with sun block, thongs and good intentions. Or, if, like me, you are planning to favour Tenby, a chilblain remedy, ear muffs and a stormproof thermal one-piece. But you will still want to take the good intentions, by which I mean books. Summer holidays, you see, are traditionally the time when Britons try to atone for their literary sins of omission by reading in two weeks all the books they have felt guilty about ignoring for the past 50.

No matter that our holiday good intentions usually end at baggage reclaim, when we disappointedly haul home a yard of unread or abandoned paperbacks on which we have had to pay excess baggage twice over. This wasn't the summer when we really got to grips with Heidegger's Being and Time, Milton's Paradise Lost or Seth's A Suitable Boy. We have tried and failed, but there is always next year.

According to a 2007 survey, a quarter of Britons say they have not read a book in the past year. This is depressing enough, but it does not tell the whole dismal story. Even among the remaining 75%, a lot of readers are stuck in books that won't yield to our reasonable desire for closure. We are stuck at that bit in Zadie Smith's White Teeth where she introduces a whole new tranche of characters and you know that you should, but you know that you won't, bother to carry on and finish the bloody thing. Or we are floundering in the middle of The Brothers Karamazov, having lost track of which sibling is which and also uncertain as to whether Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova is the same person as Grushenka and, if so, whether she is also called Grusha and Grushka and, if so, why is Dostoevsky messing with our minds as we strap-hang on the bus trying to impress fellow travellers who are all racing through the new Victoria Hislop (losers). Or they are flicking dismally through Finnegans Wake, wondering how on earth they could have been so stupid as to buy something so unremittingly unreadable as this novel which, admittedly, was the third book in a three-for-two deal at Borders.