Essay: SUMMER READING: Risks, Rules & Rewards

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Even in paperback, the Alexandria Quartet, Anthony Powell's The Music of Time series, Gide's Journals and all of C. P. Snow are apt to stir poolside suspicion. Anyone who takes his summer reading seriously must weather such risks—or else tuck his Doctor Zhivago inside Doctor No. The lowbrow in search of status will reverse the process and hide Sexus under, say, Koestler's The Act of Creation. The camouflage problem is more complicated for the compulsive careerist, who always gets "some good new books" before he leaves on vacation. But how can he bury The Speculative Significance of the Inner Action of the Market under Sam Snead's How to Hit a Golf Ball? An antithetical quandary faces the Communer with Nature who vows that reading is the curse of civilization and goes off to a remote isle to stare into space. After four days of memorizing every label in the medicine cabinet and pantry, he appears wild-eyed in the nearest drugstore and hauls off The Ambassadors, Jude the Obscure, Conversations with Stalin, three old Margery Al-linghams and Pornography and the Law.

One of the most ardent of all literature luggers is the Experience Maximizer, who seeks to extract every ounce of significance from his travels by boning up on the history and folklore of the place he is visiting. For a sojourn in Italy this summer, a Manhattan couple came armed with H. V. Morton's A Traveller in Rome and A Traveller in Italy, Luigi Barzini's The Italians, and a clutch of Moravia novels. Another species of Experience Maximizer is represented by Washington's Laughlin Phillips, a former State Department officer, who during shore vacations in Maryland cracks nothing but shellfish and books on shellfish.

For many readers, vacations mean a ritualistic return to the old favorites that an Edgartown, Mass., summer resident calls "come-as-you-are books." Cartoonist Al Capp chuckles himself to sleep by dipping into Martin Chuzzlewit or Little Dorrit. A sophisticated young matron on New York's Fire Island unabashedly begins her vacation with Frank Yerby's Pride's Castle and Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios. Another confirmed repeater is Author Barzini, who claims that "you can always open Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and find some wonderful sequence about a Byzantine emperor gouging his son's eyes out." A psychiatrist might sneer that the compulsive repeater needs a familiar book for the same reason that Linus totes his blanket—as a form of security against the bristling insecurities of a strange environment.