Borges and the Toothbrush or What to Read on Holiday

The BBC recently aired a documentary about Bruce Chatwin (about whom I have an interest since I wrote the first book about him, photographed here by a friend of mine in an African schoolroom) to co-incide with the publication of Chatwin's selected letters.  One of the clips was from a TV chat show where "Bruce" was holding forth on Borges whose work, he said, should always go into the traveller's knapsack, as an essential "like a toothbrush".  I see his point and it raises the old question of what one does take on holiday.  I am off to Corfu for a week and the choice, as usual, is between a big fat serious book and more "entertaining" matter.  I usually choose the former and I was about to pack Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus, having been alerted to it by Gabriel Josipovici in his new book (see recent post) and having realised I hadn't read it.  But I have an hour or two to decide.  I am hovering over Labyrinths and a book or two of poems.  With memories of a whole holiday dominated by the 1000 odd pages of Dombey and Son I am leaning towards some elegant brevity.  Aldous Huxley's recommendation was for Boswell's life of Johnson, in the portable Oxford india paper edition, which I have somewhere, but this is a short trip and I will be doing a lot of lazing and daydreaming so something a little more dilettante is going to end up in the bag I can see.  Plenty of time to get serious again when I am back. (But I'll slip in the Mann anyway as an insurance policy.)