There are many things I love about a treasured week my wife Nora and I spend each year on a Maine island.*  One of them is vacation book scavenging. This activity both supports one of the four pillars of the week, which are hiking, reading, eating, and just spending time together, and the overall theme of a suspension of normal routine.
Rather than bringing a pile of ARCs I restrict myself to two, only one of which I would have read normally. The other must be a book by an author we have sold for years but I have never read. For the rest of the week’s reading I commit myself to books I find in the house we rent.
This sort of book scavenging, apart from taking me out of my frontlist comfort zone, provides a unique form of backlist discovery of authors like Ian Rankin. A copy of The Naming of the Dead found in a past year ended up providing not only a fun personal Rankin binge, but a steady handsell  favorite for me in our mystery section back at the store.
I read so much kids for duty and pleasure that I usually aim for adult on the Island. For the ARCs I decided to go with Martin Cruz Smith’s The Girl in Venice and The Wonder by Emma Donaghue. Smith is an author I’d never read, but we’ve always sold well. The setting in wartime Venice sounded intriguing but in practice I found the narrative too aggressive in framing what readers were expected to feel about characters and events. The map was not matching the territory in crucial ways and the suspension of disbelief sagged under the weight of too much unconvincing dialogue. The Wonder, on the other hand, was a terrific book. Donaghue managed to create a very different, but equally fascinating, closed room story from her first novel, Room. Her depiction of rural Ireland in the 1860’s, its cultural, religiosity, and medical practice, was wonderfully authentic and the elements of mystery, intrigue and romance, all carried off in a very confined space, were riveting. It also comes equipped with a great ending.
It was midweek at this point and time for scavenging. Looking through the downstairs bookcase I was struggling to find something of interest when I flipped around a hardcover book that had been shelved spine in. Aha! It was a Lee Child Jack Reacher  book, 61 Hours. I had been meaning to try Lee out for years. 61 Hours proved to be a really fun vacation read: great villainy, unexpected loose ends and fallibility, good stuff. The fact that I scoured the house for another Reacher novel, an unrequited quest alas, indicated to me that I could focus on handselling this series back home in a big way.
With no Reacher followup at hand I went upstairs and found another bookcase. Things were looking bleak until I encountered a Peter Hopkirk book called Trespassers on the Roof of the World, The Race for Lhasa. This turned out to be a fascinating nonfiction account of the 19th-century attempts by westerners to penetrate the secrets of the closed kingdom of Tibet by all sorts of wild, stealthy, and dangerous means. Though over 20 years old the book is in print along with other Hopkins books on The Great Game era of Russian and British territorial adventuring in Asia. Huzzah!
All in all it was another great year for vacation book scavenging. Are there other scavengers out there? I’d love to hear your favorite finds!
* Yes I made it back for Harry Potter and Waldo Festivities.