We recently enjoyed a month’s holiday – the longest we’ve ever had – to celebrate Luiz’s retirement.  One of the happiest elements in packing for a trip is messing about choosing which books to take.  Here’s the pile I took and read on a lovely beach in the Dominican Republic, interspersed with beach strolls and paddling in warm, turquoise water on talc-fine bright sand.

• Dante – The Divine Comedy
• Erasmus – Praise of Folly
• Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens
• Seamus Heaney – Finders Keepers
• Nikos Kazantzakis – The Last Temptation
• William Willeford – The Fool and His Sceptre
• Histoire Suisse
• Institutions Politiques Suisses

Some will be reviewed in the coming weeks and months and will pop up in new Quotes, Metaphors and Triologisms.  Sapiens was bought by Luiz just before we left and I read it after he had.  The two thin books at the bottom of the pile are on Swiss history and Swiss political institutions – I was training for Swiss citizenship, and having had the exam, I needed all the study I did and could have done with a bit more.

Another joy of the holiday was the warmth, humour and kindness of the staff, who were simply outstanding human beings.  And a fine and much needed antidote to the pessimism engendered by Sapiens.

Post script: of the books listed above, two have now been given the full review treatment: see our illustrated quote-rich celebration of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Clive James’ entrance-lation, and Kazantzakis’ Last Temptation.   Erasmus is next!

And at the beginning of 2020, I qualified as a Swiss citizen, so beach study works.  

Photo credit: featured image by Ethan Robertson at unsplash.com; beach book pile by the author (of this blog), that is, the reader of the books…