The MR PORTER team share the books they’ll be packing for their holidays this year.

There is something to be said for being adventurous with your vacation. But you’re never going to return to work feeling rejuvenated if you’ve spent your hard-earned holiday hiking in the Himalayas or Interrailing across Europe. You may well feel culturally enriched, but who needs that when you can achieve total relaxation by lying on a sun lounger for a week doing nothing but drinking Aperol spritz and enjoying a good (or utterly terrible) book. Want to follow our lead? Below, we reveal what we’ll be reading (and wearing) while horizontal this summer.

MR SAM MUSTON Deputy Editor

by Mr Edward St Aubyn

This, the third of Mr Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, is a wonderfully terrible book – waspish, witty, harrowing, taking in redemption and the outer boundaries of experience. The plot follows one man, Patrick, as he goes to a (wonderfully satirised) aristocratic party in the countryside full of dreadful people and Princess Margaret. The party unfolds and Patrick, as well as resisting his newly shed drug addiction also reveals the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his father. As I say, not an easy book, but Mr St Aubyn’s sentences can turn on a sixpence and are never anything but beautiful. I intend to read it in the gardens of the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera, a blissful place which couldn’t be further away from the places described in the novel.

What to pack

**MR JIM MERRETT **Chief Sub-Editor

by Mr William Finnegan

Dropping into this autobiography, it probably won’t be much of a surprise to learn that for his day job, Mr Finnegan turns out finely tuned copy for The New Yorker. But this really is something else: a join-the-dots of the world’s best surf breaks written in such a considered and engrossing manner that even someone with a pathological fear of neoprene can’t help but get carried away by it. I shall be reading it by some suitably lapping body of water that I will – at a push – consider dipping my toes into.

What to pack

MR CHRIS ELVIDGE Associate Editor

by Mr Lee Child

I’ve just started reading If This Is A Man, Mr Primo Levi’s harrowing account of his incarceration in Auschwitz. It’s a remarkable book, but I don’t think it’ll earn a place in my suitcase this summer. It’s just a bit… heavy. (The subject matter, I mean. It’s only a couple of hundred pages long.) You wouldn’t take a bottle of Château Margaux to the beach; you'd opt for something light and quaffable instead. That’s why, along with my Frescobol Carioca bat and ball and Orlebar Brown swim shorts, I’ll be taking No Middle Name, Mr Lee Child's complete collection of Jack Reacher short stories, which is due for release later this month.

What to pack

MR JONATHAN DANN Editorial Assistant

by Ms Patricia Highsmith

Ever since watching the 1999 film The Talented Mr Ripley, I have always wanted to travel to the Amalfi Coast. And what better book to read for the trip than Ms Patricia Highsmith’s original novel. In tribute to Mr Jude Law’s original style I will be donning knitted polo shirts and these tailored swim short to take me from the beach to dinner alfresco. La dolce vita, indeed.

What to pack

MR DAN ROOKWOOD US Editor

by Mr Paul Beatty

On average I read about four or five books a night… to my 11-month-old twin girls. I haven’t actually got all the way through a proper book in, oh, about 11 months. You can see the correlation there. I do that thing of re-reading the same three paragraphs every night until I lose the fight with sleep. The few pages I have managed to read of The Sellout over the past couple of weeks (*cough* months) have been very funny, so I’m looking forward to being the very last person I know to get all the way through this much-hyped Man Booker Prize winner when we go to Upstate New York for a week at the end of May. I suspect I might need these headphones, though.

What to pack

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