Summer reading

Mary Killen

Gone Girl by the American writer Gillian Flynn comes recommended by both high- and middle-brow readers (Orion, £7.99). I want the reported total absorption from the off and the welcome relief from thinking about anything other than what’s on the next page.

The Blue Riband, Peter York’s anecdotal history of the Piccadilly Line (Penguin, £4.99) is ideal for lounger life as almost every sentence is interesting, stylish and witty, and you can read it aloud at random to pool mates too lazy to hold a book up themselves. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poems and Prose (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, £9.99). Just focus on learning by heart, say, three poems per holiday. They will stand you in good stead, not just as party pieces but for when you’re stuck in lifts or traffic.

Matthew Parris

I’m only a few pages into Snug, by Matthew Tree (AK Digital, £12.62) and I know already I shall sail through it. Tree somehow thinks like me: writer and reader fit. It’s a first novel and I can tell it’s going to be ambitious in its resolve to be both serious and funny. And I’m intrigued by an author venturing at last into his own mother tongue: living in Barcelona — where he’s widely known and published — Tree has written only in Catalan for the past two decades.

Meanwhile, I’m but a few chapters from the end of Romola, George Eliot’s most difficult novel. This, too, was a tremendously ambitious venture — to relive the life of 16th-century Florence — and I don’t think it quite works; but I adore Eliot’s mind, and when I’m old and useless I shall assemble from all her work a treasury of her finest passages. Finally I want to re-read at leisure a memoir I raced through in May for a Spectator review: Last Man In (Neville & Harding, £20).