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"I adore fine Weather as the greatest blessing I can have. Give me Books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know.” So wrote the poet John Keats to his sister Fanny in August 1819. He didn’t have long for this idyll. Less than two years later he was dead, aged 25.

Holidays offer us that precious illusion of having time enough, at last, to do as we want, to read what we will. We can return to the books we love most; we can discover what’s new; we can give sustained and undivided attention to the most challenging and rewarding reads.

Or so we hope every year. The reality is often different: big-brand bestsellers, hastily grabbed, soon put down in disappointment. And that’s a shame. For though our dreams of reading may never be entirely fulfilled, a little preparation yields disproportionate rewards. Don’t end up scavenging the displays at the airport bookshops. Plan a little.

Perhaps be sure to take at least one book you already know and love? The Labour grandee Denis Healey used unfailingly to tell the papers, year after year, that it was the collected poems of Emily Dickinson and W B Yeats that he was taking away with him on his hols, presumably to show us all what a massive hinterland he still had.

Or perhaps he really did tote these trophy items annually? Actually, it’s not such a bad idea, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Faber, £20), at least. Or the poems and letters of poor Keats — John Keats: Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics, £12.99).

Once you’ve got that sorted, move on to the best of the new books. Here are our tips for good reading this summer.

The Midnight Line by Lee Child (Bantam, £7.99). Every holiday needs a good thriller: if you haven’t yet caught up with this, one of Lee Child’s best, on the theme of opioid addiction, here it is.

Otherwise, our crime reviewer Mark Sanderson recommends Bloody January by Alan Parks (Canongate, £12.99), Glaswegian noir; Robicheaux: You Know My Name by James Lee Burke (Orion, £8.99), Louisiana baroque; and London Rules by Mick Herron (Murray, £12.99), MI5 misfits. And not to forget all those marvellous new Penguin translations of Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels — plenty for an all-Maigret holiday — and also Simenon’s quite different and seriously good “romans durs”, such as The Krull House (Penguin Classics, £10.99).

For a novel stretching the limits of the form, don’t miss Kudos by Rachel Cusk (Faber, £16.99), completing her trilogy of “auto-fiction”: a series of people reveal themselves while the author remains a kind of negative space, exposing them ruthlessly.

Otherwise, Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (Faber, £8.99) is the voice of a new generation; Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury, £8.99), re-casting Antigone among British Muslims, won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction; Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (HarperCollins, £8.99) has deservedly sold 470,000 copies, so soothing are its routines.

Among this year’s most rewarding rediscoveries, for those who treasure the supernatural, there’s Compulsory Games by Robert Aickman (NYRB Classics, £12.99), a lifetime’s sinister and uncanny short stories, all ending darkly.

There has been a lot of great nature writing recently — notably Mark Cocker’s impassioned Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before it is too Late? (Cape, £18.99) and Isabella Tree’s engrossing account of what she and her husband have attempted on their estate in Sussex, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm (Picador, £20).

The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel (Simon & Schuster, £8.99) is the bizarre and compelling true story of Christopher Knight who, at the age of 20, retreated into complete solitude, living rough in the woods in Maine for the next 27 years, told by a journalist who’s pretty odd too.

If politics is compatible with holiday-making for you, the most head-clutching read is Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, brilliant fly-on-the-wall reporting by Michael Wolff (Little, Brown, £20).

Douglas Murray’s masterly analysis of where we are now and where we are headed, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (Bloomsbury, £9.99) is essential reading, being a story studiously untold elsewhere.

In popular science, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O’Connell (Granta, £9.99) won this year’s Wellcome Book Prize: it’s also quite the romp.

Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker (Penguin, £9.99) is not only wonderfully revelatory about half of life, it will change the way you think about the subject.

Medical memoirs are a strong new genre: two of the best are This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay (Picador, £8.99) and The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story by Christie Watson (Chatto, £14.99).

And then there’s dating… Dolly Alderton’s memoir Everything I Know About Love (Fig Tree, £12.99) is honest, funny and touching, while the debut adult novel by Holly Bourne, How Do You Like Me Now? (Hodder, £12.99) has also been greeted with cries of delighted if rueful recognition: Bridget Jones for millennials, said one reviewer.

The heroic judges of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction decided not to award it this year, since none of the 62 submissions fulfilled the criteria of making all the judges laugh out loud. No funnies, then? Try Simon Rich’s new collection of sketches, Hits & Misses (Serpent’s Tail, £10.99).

And for those who want to go back into the past, the history book to treasure is In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilisation in Early Modern England by Keith Thomas (Yale, £25). A holiday in itself.