When I was younger, I used to read to disappear. Nothing’s changed — except that the hours that true literary disappearance requires are no longer as readily available. To most of us — in hectic lives full of jobs, phones, children, friends, spelunking, ichthyology . . . whatever takes up your time — we discover as we get older that the stuff is precious.
Yet some books force disappearance. I laughed when I saw that Virginia Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic was on this list. I first encountered it at summer camp, many years ago. I hated summer camp, that benighted ritual of the American childhood; but Flowers in the Attic made a couple of long, rainy afternoons bearable. Great literature? I don’t know about that. But a page-turner? Oh, yes.
It’s the books that make you turn the pages — turn, turn, keep turning, what happens next? — that reinvent themselves as you. Go on, try Flowers in the Attic or, if that’s not your style (and fair do’s; a bunch of blond siblings kept prisoner and fed on poisoned doughnuts isn’t everyone’s cup of tea), see what all the fuss is about and take on Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander. Seen the movie? Now read the book.
We like to think that there is something for everyone here; and while this is, for the most part, fiction, Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People is a most unusual memoir. The Irish childhood has been done before; but Hamilton’s Irish nationalist father and German immigrant mother make a different mix.
So take some time to disappear. With Hamilton, Jeanette Winterson, Jack Kerouac. Keep turning the pages. We won’t say where you’ve gone.