ABSTRACT
I’ve long been fascinated by what people read. While others might confess to a penchant for peeking in the bathroom cupboard, I’ve always been the one sidling along the bookshelves sizing up my hosts as I scrutinise their reading matter. Indeed, I’ve just had one of those holidays in a beach house owned by people I don’t know which left me with some delightful speculations about their taste in books. On the same shelf as a copy of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (in its pristine unopened condition) was a biography of Richard Nixon (used) and a well thumbed suntan-oily Judith Krantz, not to mention a collected Agatha Christie. I warmed to these people in their eclecticism and instinctively felt I understood the Kafka, the kind of book one always intends to read, though probably not on holiday.
