And the saga of deciding what book to take on vacation continues. Usually I pack three or four (or five) novels, so that I have one for each plane ride and then several to choose from during the trip, in case I get bored or in case something turns out to suck. This year I am hampered by my weird and hopefully temporary distaste for anything too contemporary. Or maybe my post-exam stress syndrome is just manifesting itself in a bout of extreme pickiness. Either way, I have already rejected the following texts, based on the tried-and-true “read the first couple of chapters and see if it puts me to sleep” test:

• George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss. Probably I should just suck it up and take this one along, because I read well over fifty pages without any difficulty. And it’s George Eliot so I would probably warm up to it eventually. But it’s so twee. I don’t read Eliot for twee.
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion. Too many made-up words. I just can’t do it, not when I’m already going to be trying to communicate in a language I don’t actually speak.
• George Sand, Horace. I thought this one might work because I had such good luck with Vanity Fair the last time I went on vacation. But Sand is not Thackeray. This still looks like a good read but it is not the right book for this trip.
• Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers. I really thought this would work. The Count of Monte Cristo is such a perfect vacation book! But the first chapter annoyed the hell out of me and I put it back on the shelf.
• Charlotte Brontë, Villette. Eh. I really want to read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall but I was apparently lying a while ago when I said I’d ordered a paperback copy of the latter, because I don’t seem to have one.

The following are still under consideration:

• George MacDonald, Lilith. A surprising front-runner, considering how much I hated Phantastes. But I read the latter for my least favorite class ever, and that might have colored my view. Anyway, this is the one that has grabbed me the most. If I go with this choice I will probably need to scrap my one-book rule and take another.
• Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo. Yes, I was just deriding her yesterday, but this passed the first chapter test.
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. This was really my first choice, because it fits with my recent Jane Austen kick. But this novel has three drawbacks for a vacation read: one, it is really too short. Two, I have read it before. And three, I didn’t really like it the first time.
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit. Also short and also one that I have read before, but I remember almost nothing about it except what one can gather from reading the Rings trilogy.
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This would be the Hail Mary pass of vacation books. I don’t want to take this one because it is huge and yet will take me no time at all to finish. I’ve already read it once, but I have completely forgotten most of it. I should probably reread it before the next book comes out, but I’d really rather listen to it than read it. Mostly I just don’t want to be the dumb American reading Harry Potter on the beach.
• Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco . Jeremy wants me to read this and if I don’t take it along, he is going to mock me and nag me all through the trip and I will probably kill him. But if I were in the mood to read a contemporary novel, I would have to read The Years With Laura Díaz or even the not very contemporary The Brothers Karamazov for the book club. Anyway, it is my vacation and I am not in the mood for post-colonial craziness.

I will probably go with Lilith and Northanger Abbey. But maybe I’ll bring Ann Radcliffe along just in case.

Prince Caspian. Lynn Redgrave is a wonderful reader, maybe the best I’ve heard. This is an excellent audiobook.

While I am still deciding what paperback to take on my vacation, I am not fucking around with the audiobooks. My iPod Shuffle is going to be filled with as many of the Narnia books as I can fit.

I am listening to these in their original order, but not because I am some kind of purist who is having a fit because the publisher is messing with my childhood. I originally read these books entirely out of order: my mother picked up The Horse and His Boy for me during my horse-crazy years, when I would read anything about horses but nothing whatsoever about magic and fantasy and strange lands. After that I read the others as I could get them from the library, and I think that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe may have been the last one I read.

A few years ago I read a one-volume Chronicles of Narnia in the new order, and I thought it worked quite well. The story of the witch and the wardrobe always seems more compelling to me if you already know the original history.

The Mill on the Floss. At the moment I don’t know whether I am actually reading this or just thinking about it. I am about to leave for vacation, and I want to take exactly one meaty novel with me because I am packing light and carrying only a small knapsack. I am about forty pages into this and I could certainly stick it out during vacation, but so far it is a little cloying. I am test driving The Three Musketeers this weekend and I might take that instead.

Persuasion. Last week I said that I thought Anne Elliot was a doormat. I was probably unfair, but she is still my least favorite Austen heroine, far behind Fanny Price and even behind that conceited pain in the ass Emma. (Yes, I definitely think Emma is worse than Fanny.)

Objectively I can see why so many consider this to be Austen’s best novel. But it leaves me a little cold. I don’t care for Anne and the novel is so short that I don’t really have time to get involved and warm up to her before it all ends very abruptly. Unlike the other Austen novels, which I have grown to love more on each reading, I liked this one best the first time I read it, and it feels like it’s all downhill from here.

Frankenstein. Please don’t kill me if I admit that I liked the 1994 Kenneth Branagh version better. Well, not the whole thing, just the ending, or the bit about what happens to Elizabeth. That movie version was pretty mockable, if I recall correctly, but I mostly enjoyed it, and now that I’ve read the book I think Branagh certainly got a lot of things right. And his ending is better than Mary Shelley’s, so there.

It is hard for me to judge this novel fairly because of the audiobook. While the reader was quite good, there was a lot of overdubbing of some other reader’s voice, presumably to correct mistakes, except often the dubbing came after instead of over the original lines, so many lines and several entire paragraphs got repeated. So it would not really be fair for me to say that the novel seemed a bit repetitive, would it? And yet it did, and I don’t think the fault is all in the audio production.

But I liked it quite a lot. I don’t know why I’ve never read it before, maybe because it is always described as a gothic novel and I have had trouble with Walpole and Radcliffe and all the usual gothic nonsense. As I said in my first post about the novel, though, to me the novel is more in the vein of Melville and Hawthorne.

Like Dracula, this is probably destined to wind up on my annual rereading list.

Frankenstein. I think I am almost done with this one so I will write more about it after I finish. I am enjoying it a lot — it is not at all what I expected. Mary Shelley reminds me a lot of some of the darker American transcendentalist writers although there are obviously many distinctions. This novel is much sadder than I expected it to be, even though I know the story from filmed versions.

I can’t recommend the audiobook even though it’s a good reading, because it is so poorly edited that entire passages wind up being repeated.

Persuasion. I appear to be working my way through all of Jane Austen’s novels this summer, instead of reading all the things I am supposed to be reading. I think this one is a better novel than Mansfield Park, but I really hate Anne Elliot. I know that makes me a bad person, probably just as bad as her hateful sister or her stupid father, but I hate her. I find her less bearable than Fanny Price, because Fanny actually does stand up for herself sometimes, or at least she stands up for what she thinks is right. Anne is such a doormat even by comparison to Fanny.

Mansfield Park. Okay, you were all wrong. I liked this book just fine. I liked Fanny just fine. I still think she should have stuck with Mr. Crawford, and I think her dumb prig of a cousin should have gotten the stick out of his butt, but I liked Fanny. (I certainly like her better than that annoying martyr, Anne Elliot.) I enjoyed seeing Austen kind of in retreat from her more amusing novels; I have a hard time believing she was as penitent as all that, but it’s interesting to note that she obviously felt she should have been penitent.

I suspect Austen herself was much more like Elizabeth Bennett than Fanny Price or Anne Elliot. But clearly she herself saw that as something of a character flaw.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I reread these every few summers. Unlike most children’s classics, these never make me impatient. I thought they would make good audiobooks, and in some ways they do, but this reading was marred by the narrator’s twee affectations. I’m about to start Prince Caspian, which is read by Lynn Redgrave, so hopefully that one will be better.

The Game. Possibly the most boring book I’ve started this year. I gave up after about six hours, because I had four hours left to go and I didn’t want to waste any more of my life on this boring, boring book. I did not especially like Possession but at least it was engaging. This one is just about boring British people and their boring problems. I don’t know anything about Byatt’s half-sister, Margaret Drabble, so I don’t care that this is allegedly just a veiled attack on her. Even if that’s true, it’s still a very boring attack. I think I am done with A.S. Byatt.