By Karl Shmavonian, Forbes Staff

It’s that time of year, when anybody and everybody heads to all points of the world to enjoy vacation. One item on the menu for many vacationers: What to read while on roads, airplanes, lakes or oceans. Earnest readers spend a lot of time strategizing their vacation reading lists. Therefore, it seems appropriate that all of our quotes this time are from literary folk. Writer Ben Dolnick sums up the summer reading menu: There are good books, even great books, that you read happily but with a faint feeling of duty. Then there are the books, often less pedigreed, that you read in a haze of compulsion, as if their pages emitted a drug. Summer is the season for the latter.” Colum McCann takes a disdainful view of this sort of reading: Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I’m a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.” Humorist Bill Bryson is of the opinion that you might as well sit at home and do your reading: What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.” Aldous Huxley echoes Bryson’s sentiments: To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.” Christopher Hitchens speaks for those of us who have never understood fishing as a vacation activity: For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.” Stephen Leacock takes an opposing view: ‘Angling’ is the name given to fishing by people who can’t fish. Clive James sums up another aquatic vacation activity that often ends up badly: A luxury liner is just a bad play surrounded by water.” P.J. O’Rourke gives this historical twist on vacations: Everybody in 15th century Spain was wrong about where China was and as a result, Columbus discovered Caribbean vacations.” Finally, FORBES magazine founder B.C. Forbes has this eminently sensible prescription: Temporary release from work, through vacations, becomes more welcome, more pleasurable, even more necessary, as we grow older.”   …read more

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