One Book for the Holiday Bag: What Actually Survives a Family Trip

I have packed a hopeful novel for my son on four separate holidays. It came home four times, unread, slightly damp, with sand in the spine.

Last summer I finally worked out what I’d been doing wrong, and it wasn’t the child.

Holidays break long books

Reading on a trip happens in fragments. Twenty minutes in an airport. The gap before dinner when everyone’s showered and nobody’s hungry yet. Forty minutes in the back of a car. Ten minutes on a towel before somebody wants to go back in the water.

A novel needs continuity. Pick it up after two days and you’ve lost the thread, and a child who’s lost the thread does not go back to find it. They put it down and reach for something with a screen, and honestly, so would I.

Short pieces survive that. Something you can finish in one sitting, complete in itself, no memory required.

Which is why anthologies travel well

Short story collections work. So do biography collections, which is what we make, so treat that as an interested opinion rather than an impartial one.

The structure is the point: one life, a few pages, done. If he reads one on Tuesday and nothing again until Friday, nothing is lost. He starts a new one. There’s no accumulated debt.

Poetry books work for the same reason. So do those thick books of facts about sharks and volcanoes, which I used to be snobbish about and no longer am.

What I look for before it goes in the bag

Pictures on most pages. On holiday, a wall of text loses to the pool every time.

Short entries. Three to six pages. Long enough to be a story, short enough to finish before the swimming.

Paperback. Hardbacks are heavy and I have never once regretted a book that got wrecked, only one that never got opened.

Something they picked. This is the one I keep having to relearn. The book I chose gets read out of politeness for about nine minutes.

The part where I lower expectations

Here’s what a good holiday of reading looks like in our house: maybe four stories over ten days. Perhaps six if it rains.

That is fine. It’s genuinely fine. The point was never volume, it was that a book was one of the available things during the empty hours, and that he reached for it at least sometimes without being asked.

The empty hours are the whole opportunity, and they only exist on holiday. Nobody has an unstructured Tuesday afternoon in November.

So pack something short, keep quiet about it, and let the boredom do the work.

If you want an idea of the format, our books are collections of short illustrated lives for ages 8 to 12. Three to five pages each, questions at the end, and they hold up to sand reasonably well.