SEASONAL TREATS

When I still lived in Europe we vacationed in Switzerland every year, taking two or three days to motor through Belgium, France, and Germany to get there. When I woke up it was with keen memories of one Swiss hotel still in my head. A nice place, surrounded by hillside forest. The corner room with trees and leaf-shadow right outside the windows. And my mother's book suitcase. Naturally one reads during vacation. A lot. It's what one does.

The memories were probably spurred by remembering the books in our house back then, and considering what books a growing mind needs to create moods, mental tools, a flexible and receptive teenage intellect. Plus authors. Parents can provide the books, but just have to hope that their offspring takes the bait. Not all books suitable for children (and young adults) are suitable for children (and young adults) or appeal to them.


Teenagers are given to obsessions. I read all the Nabokov, Kipling, Somerset Maugham, and Saki I could lay my eyes on. Along with huge amounts of science fiction and rather much English language poetry. Plus Shakespeare. East Indies stuff didn't make an impact on me till much later, along with, at a different time, German and Chinese poetry.

Dutch literature was a more accidental process.
Which it largely still is.

Still haven't discovered Sylvia Plath. I suppose I should.

I kind of lost my taste for poetry somewhere along the way. Much of it is doggerel, especially the Romantics, and equally much is not as good as Jabberwocky, which is rather splendid stuff. When poetry in Dutch is good, it sings. There is an internal logic and rigour there which is remarkable, and given that each poet in that language essentially has to reinvent the tongue and bash it into shape, the result are sometimes stellar.

Whenver I go back to the Netherlands I buy books. Which I then box up and mail to myself, as I have no need to stagger through airports with too much baggage.



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