On the up: Alan Hollinghurst
On the down: The difficulty in finding excellent holiday reads

I learnt something real valuable these two weeks, which is not to start reading a book by an author you've never read before. While travelling to Singapore and Bangkok, I thought I'd bring a book by someone "new" who I'd not heard of before. It looked promising and pretty (judging books by cover) and the subject itself looked inspiring, relevant and beautiful.

54 pages into the book and I wanted to throw it out of our 9th floor hotel room window, only I didn't because Eleni might have thought it a bit mad and I didn't want to waste paper like that. There's only so many pages of whingeing and depression and "poor me I'm so depressed so now I'm going to go find myself" you can take before you want to start giving yourself papercuts from the book, just to relieve yourself from the pain of reading it. I got well pissed off with myself for having chosen a bad book and having nothing to read in our in-between travel times.

So for Pangkor Laut, I played safe and settled on Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star. No more gambles, and well, you absolutely cannot go wrong with Alan Hollinghurst. And it proved most definitely the best reading for a luxe beach resort where you feel as indolent, lazy and desiring as the whole book.

I so so so so sooooooooooooo want to write like Hollinghurst when I grow up because that is what Really Good Writing really is all about.