Kindles can't stop a bullet!

Books, famously, furnish a room, and arguably a soul.  They also furnish a handbag, a backpack, a messenger bag and a pocket.  Especially a pocket.  It has been suggested that, back in the days when Penguin were publishing what are now described as design classics fit to feature on mugs and deckchairs, but back then were, you know, books, artful seducers used to carefully select just which book would be just visible jutting jauntily from their (tweed) jacket pocket, ensuring that any impressionable young woman might note that the dashing chap at the end of the bar was familiar with Lady Chatterly, and opening up the possibility that she might play ‘Mrs Mellors’ for a short time.

Books are also something of a comfort.  There’s a reason why the ‘YA’ section of your average high street book store is enormous, it’s because the only thing that teenagers consume more of than fiction about misunderstood young people is haribo and zit cream.  If, as a teenager, you are so confused that you don’t even understand yourself (except for your feelings about Lizzy Feathergrew who sits across from you in double chemistry, your feelings for her are very, very clear, but you wonder if she’s into girls) then it’s good to read about teenagers struggling with being teenagers.  If they also have to struggle with vampires, alien invasions or oppressive regimes, then so much the better.  Just read that shit up and wait until you’re twenty six, sitting at your desk or standing at your lathe or slinging latte or assisting at lambing time or whatever, and you go bolt upright (very much like you used to do at the thought of Lizzy Feathergrew) and say, out loud, ‘Fuck.  Allegory!’.  Then move on.

We take books into uncertain environments.  There are rightly celebrated relics of the battlefield, books that have stopped bullets because the soldier in question was either clever or fortunate enough to have a book, for instance The Bible, in a pocket that covered an important organ (not The Mighty Wurlitzer).  That The Bible has saved the lives of so many Tommies because of its ballistic blocking abilities is less to do with its miraculous heritage and more, I would suggest, to do with the fact it records everything from the creation to Armageddon.

Ironically, if our gallant soldier was carrying a slim volume of verse by a poet reflecting on the horrors of war, he’d be fucked.

The moral of the story, if you are going into battle, read Stephen King.

Sadly, there are still too many battlefields.  There are also many uncertain environments.  And no environment is more uncertain than ‘abroad’.  That is why the choice of holiday reading is so important.

If it’s a beach holiday, then the prime directive is this; you must not be precious about the bottom of your book absorbing around a litre of perspiration from the tummy you rest it on (hopefully yours, if you rest your book on somebody else’s tummy whilst on holiday, you are reading the wrong blog) and being forever impregnated with the scent of suncream.

As an arch bibliophile (look it up before calling the police) I find the notion of giving away a book about as disturbing as the notion of trying to track down Lizzy Featherstone on social media years after she left school.  Without saying goodbye.

Anyway, despite requiring counselling if I lend somebody a book, I am tremendously impressed by the libraries that spring up in resorts, where tourists drop off one book and pick up another.  Like literary STDs.

There should be a military imprint of bestsellers, with Kevlar front and back covers.  If nothing else, this would enable some squaddie somewhere to proudly show off his copy of ‘Fuck the French’ with a bullet embedded in the front cover (a picture of Jeremy Clarkson, in leather jacket and jeans, looking incredulous).

Bullet position?  Head or crotch.  You choose.

As might the enemy.  As with ‘Mrs Mellors’, might your attention be drawn to a cheeky cover poking out of a pocket and, if you were a foreigner might you think ‘Ah, Clarkson’?

Books, you see, are the best defence.  Ask a teenager.