Still on the subject of summer reading, I have been pointedly ignoring all the features in various papers that give critics’ recommendations of what to read over the summer. There was a time, in my book-reviewing past, when my opinion used to be solicited, but on the whole this “summer reading” or “Christmas reading” lark is just another way of giving a bit of free publicity to friends’ books. Besides, one was supposed to recommend something published in the last year – and everyone knows that all the good books were written by people who have been dead for decades, or in some cases, centuries, even millennia. Anyway, my summer reading is Charles Dickens’s early work The Pickwick Papers. I always feel summer is the time when one should fill in the gaps and take up one of those books one has always meant to read and never has. I have never read anything by Dostoevsky, and probably never will, but I have read most of Dickens, and now that I am almost 200 pages into Pickwick, I keep on asking myself how I could have left it so long. Pickwick is a simply marvellous book, the best of Dickens, in that it has none of his faults (the convoluted plots, the melodrama, the emotional blackmail, the overheated rhetoric) and all of his genius – his light-hearted sense of fun. Incidentally, before Pickwick I re-read A Tale of Two Cities: that too is a “good” Dickens, in that the plot is relatively streamlined, even if the novel is politically confused at its heart. Dickens cannot really make up his mind about the French Revolution, can he? He hates the Terror and its violence – his portrait of Madame Defarge and her sidekick the Vengeance represents his melodramatic streak at its best – but he also hates the aristocracy and the Catholic Church, treating both with scant respect and less understanding – his tendency to caricature at its worst. But Dickens was pretty confused in many ways, wasn’t he? The great educational reformer who sent his son to Eton; the outwardly pious novelist who seems to have a real animus against organised religion; and a man whose writing gives off some pretty weird signals about matters of the heart. Yet, luckily, none of these things surface in Pickwick, or are present to distort that novel’s lively and engaging tone. My other summer reading is of authors who died millennia ago. My many years of education do have something to show for themselves after all: I mean an appreciation of Catullus and Horace and Virgil. I have an edition of Catullus dating back to 1914 that I picked up second hand, and I have to say that there is nothing greater in my estimation than Carmen XXXI, the Sirmio poem: