AROUND this time of year comes the vexed topic of the “summer read” for those of us lucky enough to take a break from work and instead sit around doing nothing in a theoretically therapeutic way.

Many readers I’m sure will pooh-pooh the idea that a break from work requires a different kind of book to the one you typically read.

If you’re a fan of thrillers, you should read thrillers. If you love combing your way through hefty tomes on socialist economics, you’ll adore combing your way through hefty tomes on socialist economics on the beach.

Ed Miliband was very much in the latter camp. When he was the new(ish) Labour leader, he headed off to Devon with digital copies of cheery tomes such as Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram G Rajan and Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson.

Reverting to type, last year George Osborne plumped for a hagiography of Henry Kissinger by the odious right-wing historian Niall Ferguson.

Andy Burnham told the Telegraph he was reading Alastair Campbell’s Winners: And How They Succeed, though he might have been taking the mickey.

If you’re a hipster or a glutton for punishment, it might be good to spend your time catching up with some epic novels you’re supposed to have read by now. Impress the easily impressed by explaining you’re working your way through Gravity’s Rainbow, or get in the mood for another summer of unsympathetic migration stories by reading The Odyssey.

For me, though, summer reading is a time to collapse into the reassuringly familiar. What’s wrong with re-reading something once in a while? Dig out those Harry Potters or indulge in the slightly sinister Narnia stories of CS Lewis.

Regress.

Last week I cycled to France to spend a few days in Normandy. I was surrounded by strange WWII enthusiasts who like dressing up as US soldiers to pretend they’re taking part in the D-Day landings.

None were dressed as members of the Wehrmacht, though.

Being massively indecisive, it’s tricky to know what to stick in one’s panniers. I plumped for a bit of GK Chesterton, as recommended by an old Morning Star colleague of mine. The Man Who Was Thursday is one of the most thrilling novels I’ve ever read, with its madcap dashes from London to Paris — appropriate, in the circumstances — anarchist plots and wonderfully quotable lines.

“Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad,” says our hero Lyme, “but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.”
A quote for any occasion.

But at the holiday flat all my plans were thrown into confusion by a coffee table stuffed with well-thumbed books left by kindly previous tenants.

And sat on top of them all was one of my favourite shameless reads, one of the Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell, which later became a TV series starring professional Yorkshireman Sean Bean.

I was obsessed with them when I was a teenager. Theirs was a winning cocktail of fruity heroines, class rage — the Sharpe character had come up through the ranks to become an officer, thus finding himself in awkward situations with various “gentlemen” — and obsessively detailed battle sequences.

In short, they’re perfect for hormonal teenage boys or frustrated middle-aged Telegraph readers dreaming of a time when Britain was an imperial power.

So spend your precious free summer time reading what you like, however embarrassing it is to admit.

Just don’t write about it in a newspaper column.