What are readers packing in their bags for the lazy months of July and August? Rosita Boland talks to booksellers around the country
One of the great anticipatory pleasures of summer holidays is choosing the books you want to read. It is acknowledged in the trade that people buy books primarily as presents for others at Christmas, but in the summer, they're buying for themselves. So what are readers snapping up for the lazy days of July and August ? The Irish Times talked to bookshops around the country, from Dublin to Schull, and Sligo to Portlaoise, to find out what customers will be reading on holiday .
The number one book to emerge from our trawl is The Da Vinci Code (Corgi), by Dan Brown, the clever page-turner about art, intrigue, murder, secret societies and cyphers. Half the country seems to have read or be about to read it.
"Word of mouth keeps it going and going, and both men and women are buying it," says Siobhan Tierney of Dubray Books in Kilkenny.
"It's walking out the door," confirms Stella Birdthistle in O'Mahony's Bookshop in Limerick, while Alan Johnson in Eason's of O'Connell Street, Dublin, says "it's been out for a number of months, but summer has really kicked that book into a whole new life".
"It's the perfect holiday read," says David O'Mahony of the Killarney Bookshop in Killarney, where The Da Vinci Code is also his runaway summer seller.
It's no myth: people do want to pack light and opt for paperbacks on holidays.
"Ninety-nine per cent of people buy paperbacks for holidays," the people at the Killarney Bookshop say. Lighter and smaller books mean more room in your luggage - for extra books. Increasingly, hardbacks are seen as gift books by customers, due to their high price. This is compounded by the appearance of what's known as the "trade paperback"; a book that's the size of a hardback, but has soft covers and is priced somewhere halfway between an ordinary-sized paperback and a hardback.
Many booksellers report that most people buy on average between three and five books each for summer reading.
"You know your customers in a small place," says Frank Kelly of the Book Nest in Sligo. "The rest of the year, people would be buying one book at a time, maybe on a Friday, for the weekend, but in summer, they buy about three together. Especially if you're going abroad where you might not be able to buy books in English that easily."
"Nobody wants to run out of books on holidays," says Geraldine O'Dea, of Bookwise in Navan, who is also chairperson of the Irish branch of the Booksellers Association.
What booksellers also report, and what statistics from bestseller lists don't reflect, is the trend of people buying across genres. "Taste is a lot broader than you'd imagine," says Alan Johnson of Eason's. "We see people buying a couple of non-fiction books, like current affairs, and a couple of mass-market fiction titles, so you could have someone buying chick-lit and also non-fiction."
In non-fiction, O'Mahony's of Limerick reports that Clinton's biography, My Life (Hutchinson), Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore (Penguin), and Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack (HarperCollins) are its most popular summer reads.Though a hefty hardback at more than 900 pages, the Clinton mystique obviously means that people just can't wait for it to come out in cloth.
"People are buying a lot more books this summer than last on Bush and Iraq, and political current affairs. There 's no doubt that the war in Iraq made an impact; people want to find out more," O'Mahony's representative reports.
The store also notes that men are buying a lot more non-fiction than women, a trend repeated at the other bookshops.
Another non-fiction title doing well is Anne Applebaum's Gulag; A History of the Soviet Camps (Penguin). "Yes, believe it or not, people are taking that on holiday!" reports a spokesperson from Eason's of Dublin.
"People are definitely buying the Clinton biography to take away with them," says Joe Collins at Dublin's Hodges Figgis. Another non-fiction title that is doing well there is Nigel Slater's Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger (HarperCollins).
Regional bias also has an impact. Eamon Sweeney's The Road to Croker: A GAA Fanatic on the Championship Trail (Hodder Lir) is doing well in Kilkenny and Bookwise in Navan. In Portlaoise, at the Educational Supplies (and General) Bookshop, it's outselling The Da Vinci Code, a trend that proprietor John McNamee puts down to huge local interest in the GAA. In Sligo, Frank Kelly reports that Sweeney's book is doing exceptionally well. "I'd put it down to two things," he says. "The fact that Eamon Sweeney is from Sligo and that there are very few books about the GAA like that." It's virtually all men buying the Sweeney book. "Well, men and sports go together," says Kelly .
The Bloomsday centenary appears to have inspired readers to finally take the plunge and purchase their first copies of James Joyce's Ulysses. It's the first year the Educational Supplies (and General) Bookshop in Portlaoise has made any significant sales of Ulysses (Penguin and Oxford World Classics editions). Similarly, in Bookwise, in Navan, Geraldine O'Dea saw Joyce's novel far outsell Cecelia Ahern's PS, I Love You (HarperCollins) in June. It's the same story in Eason's where "people are saying they're finally going to give Ulysses a go this summer".
In Sligo, people are buying it too. "There was so much media coverage; people are coming in and saying they're just going to read it and try and enjoy it, rather than look for a meaning," says Frank Kelly. In Dublin's Hodges Figgis, Joe Collins reports that "people are buying Ulysses to make a real stab at it this summer. It's not a beach read - but not everyone goes to the beach on holiday".
Several booksellers report that media publicity is generating interest in particular books, with many mentioning the monthly book club on RTÉ Radio 1's Marian Finucane. Tatty (New Island Books), by Christine Dwyer-Hickey, which was featured some time ago, is "selling as well as D.B.C. Pierre's Vernon God Little (Faber) for summer", reports Eason's, which admits it is happily surprised by how well the book has taken off. Vernon God Little is also doing well in Sligo, possibly because it's Booker- winning author has been living in Co Leitrim.
In popular fiction, PS, I Love You is "head and shoulders over everything else in the genre" in Dublin, and also selling very well in Killarney, Sligo, Kilkenny, and Limerick.
"It's pink and very summery," Siobhan Tierney, of Dubray Books in Kilkenny, explains. Also "flying out" of Kilkenny stores is Melissa Hill's Not What You Think (Poolbeg), which is doing exceptionally well in Navan too. Another title selling well in Kilkenny is Annette Holiday's Happily Ever After (Poolbeg).
"The cover is of a couple on a beach holding hands - how obvious can that be for a beach read?" says one bookseller.
Meanwhile, Cathy Kelly's Best of Friends (HarperCollins) is doing well nearly everywhere.
Michael Connelly's The Narrows (Orion) and Patricia Cornwell's The Blowfly (Time Warner) were by far the top crime choices among the shops we talked to.
In the Killarney Bookshop, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Bloomsbury), a book the staff read, loved, and promoted, has become a good summer seller with local customers. Also doing well in literary fiction, in Navan's Bookwise, is James Kelman's You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free (Hamish Hamilton).
In Charlie Byrne's second-hand bookshop in Galway, Yann Martel's The Life of Pi (Canongate) is the literary novel people are buying this summer.
"Summer is a chance for people to catch up on reading the novels they've been hearing everyone talk about," Vinny Browne reports. The shop's current top holiday sellers are the Alexander McCall Smith series about a Botswana detective, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Tears of the Giraffe and The Kalahari Typing School for Men (Abacus). "We know people are buying these particular books for their holidays because they tell us," says Browne. Hodges Figgis also reports the series is doing well.
Again, region seems to influence what people buy. In Galway, books by Lorrie Moore and Ivan Klíma are much in demand. "People knew they were reading at Cúirt this year, went to hear them read, and now that it's summer and they have time they're looking for their books," explains Browne.
In Books Upstairs in Dublin, Maurice Earls reports that Angela Bourke's biography of Dublin-born writer Maeve Brennan, Homesick at the New Yorker (Jonathan Cape), is doing unexpectedly well there this summer. "Maeve Brennan seems to really have struck a chord with Dubliners," he says.
At Fuschia Books in the holiday haunt of Schull, Co Cork, Mary Mackey says many people are doing their book-buying after they arrive on holiday. The author's Cork connection is one of the reasons she thinks the hardback edition of A Bit on the Side (Viking) by William Trevor is selling so well there. Also doing well in Schull is Redmond O'Hanlon's Trawler (Penguin). Explanation? The marine set are in town.
Apart from publicity, the invaluable and incalculable word-of-mouth effect is making certain books must-read summer titles. Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Vintage) and Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea (Vintage) are consistently in demand throughout the country.
Some older titles are showing up as looked-for summer reads. In Limerick, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Picador) is still in demand. "It came in unnoticed, and people just keep on asking for it. It's a classic word-of-mouth book," says Stella Birdthistle of O'Mahony's in Limerick.
Another word-of-mouth summer read is I'm Not Scared by Niccola Ammaniti (Canongate), which the public are now picking up after an Eason's buyer read, raved about and promoted it. "They're buying it for summer now," says Alan Johnson of Eason's. "But that book will still be moving up six months from now."
Which must mean, if the trends in the book trade are consistent, that the people who read I'm Not Scared this summer, and like it, will be giving it as a gift at Christmas.