Holiday reading...by Sheila Claydon

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I will be on holiday in Singapore when this is published and although it is a family visit, which I know will include more card and board games than I actually want but, as a good grandmother, I will play, my mind has already turned to holiday reading.

Some of the books I've most enjoyed I've discovered on holiday, not because I've chosen and taken them with me but because I've found them on the pre-loved shelf in a hotel or on a cruise ship, visited a secondhand bookshop in a newly discovered town or village, or, on one occasion, bought in a sale in a National Trust stately home. 

When I'm at home my book choices are mostly governed by conversations with friends, titles I've read about, what is on the suggestion table at the library or a book giftedly by someone. On holiday it is different. I go with the flow, open to anything that looks interesting, and over the years this has introduced me to authors I'd never heard of whose books have given me immense pleasure.  Whether such a laissez-faire attitude will be possible in Singapore I don't know, but I hope so. 

Often the books I write are set in places where I've been on vacation because my other holiday activity is taking in the atmosphere, the scenery and the people, learning about the culture and enjoying the food. So much so that the tagline on my website is a ticket to romance!

While nearly every one of my novels is linked to somewhere I have visited, the two that offer the reader the best means of holiday escape are Cabin Fever and Reluctant Date. I visited and enjoyed the places featured in the books so much that I just had to write about them. 

Cabin Fever takes the reader from London to New Zealand and then on a cruise to Australia and back again, while Reluctant Date is set on the North West coast of the UK and an idyllic Florida key, with a trip to the Swanee River thrown in. Sometimes I take these, and others, down from the shelf in my study and re-read them to remind myself of past times and why I had to write the story. I hope that while I am in Singapore I will be equally inspired...and maybe I'll find another of those serendipitous books as well.

The Rewards of Random Reading by Sheila Claydon

When I go on holiday I rarely read the books I take with me. Instead I read the books previous holiday makers have left behind. Crammed onto shelves in the hotel reception area, scattered on tables in the guest lounge, stacked beside the TV in the villa or apartment...wherever we happen to be staying there are always abandoned books. And what treasures they are. On holiday I've discovered authors I've never heard of, learned new things, been reminded of  long forgotten stories, looked at situations in a different way and, in the reading, remembered why a new book is always such a joy.

Of course reading on holiday has an added bonus because it's one of the few times it's possible to read a book  from cover to cover in an afternoon.  On my last holiday I read The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and in the process learned a whole lot more about the American Deep South in the early part of the twentieth century. By the time I finished it I was so entranced that I followed it up by listening to a podcast of the actress Whoopi Goldberg being interviewed on the UK Radio programme Desert Island Discs. Whoopi Goldberg won so many acclaims for acting in the Steven Speilberg film of The Color Purple that I wanted to find out more about her, and thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I did just that. Apparently she was so deeply affected when she read the story that she wrote to the author asking for a part if a film was ever made of the book. Alice Walker wrote back about two months later to tell her she had sent  the necessary paperwork to the studios. The film script for The Color Purple was then written specifically for Whoopi Goldberg. It was her first big motion picture. The rest is history.

After I'd allowed myself enough time to think about what I'd just read, I turned to something that I thought would be very different but which turned out to be linked in the strangest way. This was Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeannette Winterson who is a well known British author. It is a semi-fictional autobiography. I know this sounds like an enigma but I assure you it's true. To understand what I mean, however, you'll have to read it.

Like Celie in The Color Purple, Jeanette Winterson is someone who lives on the edge and who also spends much of her life searching for love as well as for a lost love. I didn't see the similarities while I was reading because  one was about a black community in the American Deep South in the 1920s while the other was set in the 1960s in a poor northern town in the UK. In both books, however, the main character was lonesome and abandoned, and immensely brave.  It was only afterwards that the similarities became clear, and that is another benefit of this random holiday reading...there is far more time to think.

There were other books too, more random choices, and while I read them an amazing thing happened. In each one of those holiday books I discovered a fact that was crucial to the novel I had just started writing.  I had an outline clear in my head and the first two chapters written but what I didn't have was the detail. I needed to research a lot of things if I was to get my facts right but it was hot and sunny and I was on holiday, so I decided to concentrate on enjoying myself and worry about the detail when I returned home. Ignoring that little voice in my head that said I should at least think about my story,  I just chose those random books and settled down to read.

I had no plan...I knew very little about them. I wasn't even sure I was going to enjoy them, but although I didn't realize it, they had a plan for me. In each book I read I discovered a nugget of information that I needed to flesh out my own story. I was also confronted by a new way of looking at a situation, something that made me reconsider how one of my characters was going to react. After two weeks of reading these random stories my research was complete without any effort on my part...so to every writer whose book I read in that villa in the sun, thank you. And to every holiday maker who has ever left a book behind, thank you. Random reading has much to commend it.

This link will take you to Sheila Claydon's titles, including her latest release, Book 3 of her Pathways Trilogy,  Saving Katy Gray 
 http://bookswelove.net/claydon.phpsheilaclaydon.com