Beach Reading at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof

My September vacation in Berlin and Amsterdam with my son gave me a chance to do something I rarely enjoy: read novels, in big blocks of time. By leaving the laptop and iPad at home and limiting my smartphone use, I found sweeping vistas of unencumbered, undistracted time, the way other people chill out with their paperbacks on the beach. On planes, on trains, at hostels after a long day of pounding through the Old World’s streets and museums, I could turn to books.

Here are notes on what I call my "beach reading at the Hauptbahnhof," named after the main train station in Berlin, located a five-minute walk from our hostel.

My  selection hewed to genres I like. At home, I sometimes dip into books with limited page-turning potential, like those of late English authors Anita Brookner and Virginia Woolf. This time, however, I skipped intricate, interior-focused, emotionally challenging reads in favor of, in this order:

• World War Z by Max Robins (borrowed from a Little Free Library box near my home)
• The Heist by Daniel Silva
• The Drop by Michael Connelly
• Lock In by John Scalzi (left at home at the last moment, as I figured three books would keep me entertained for 13 days)

I loaded the list with two-fisted authors and genres that are my equivalent of beloved childhood bedtime stories—dystopian visions, spies and big-city noir police procedurals. I've read other works by all the authors except Robins, so I had total confidence in my ability to engage.

World War Z. I'm a big fan of The Walking Dead (TWD) and Fear the Walking Dead, so I immediately grabbed this book when I saw it at the Little Free Library. I had already seen the movie and found the book had a real depth and haunting quality. Following the format of Studs Terkel interviews with participants in momentous events, the book looks at a zombie apocalypse from viewpoints worldwide. It held together well and presented a vision of a situation similar to TWD but with a epic scale—military, political and social, and how a conventional war against the undead doesn't make any sense. As much as I like TWD, I came to see it as a subset of World War Z, one story arc on a global stage.

The Heist. This book couldn't have been better timed since part of the plot involved the theft of a Van Gogh painting from Amsterdam. Our itinerary included a visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. I didn't notice anything missing. I've read one other book in the multi-volume saga of art restorer-master spy Gabriel Allon, and friends are telling me to start at the beginning. All I have to do is figure out where the series begins and I have my beach reading lined up for years to come.

The Drop. I've read two of Connelly's books about LA lawyer Mick Haller: The Lincoln Lawyer and The Reversal. Both took me deep into the criminal justice system and techniques of the cops, the lawyers, the weasels at City Hall, the prosecutors and the perps. Connelly is just so good at capturing the milieu and personalities, with a minimum of bloodshed and a maximum of surprises, locales and strategies. Detective Harry Bosch is Haller's half-brother and a minor player in The Reversal. He has his own series and I decided to give one a read. This one is about the soon-to-retire Bosch juggling two challenging cases at the same time. One is the murder (or suicide?) of a politician’s son, the other a cold case involving a murder by a sexual predator. More Bosch is on tap.

I made great progress on The Drop on the flight back from Amsterdam to Boston's Logan Airport. The westward trip, eight hours in the sunshine, gifted plenty of time to race ahead without any sleepiness. By the time I grabbed an Amtrak train at South Station bound for Stamford, Connecticut, I had wrapped up The Drop and was starting to drag. Fortunately, I had picked up a final bit of beach reading at Berlin's Topographie des Terrors documentation center, with the bilingual title Deutschland 1945 Die Letzten Kriesmonate/Germany 1945 The Last Months of the War. However, my eyes refused to focus, so I simply tried to stay awake as the train flashed through the Connecticut night.

The reading splurge was a treat for me. Pre-Internet, I regularly knocked off massive books, like The Gulag Archipelago and the Children of the Arbat trilogy, the thousand-page Russian novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, The Stand by Stephen King, Moby Dick, War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk (the sequel to The Winds of War, which I read in high school). The dizzying array of distractions now gnaws at my time and attention. The main respite comes on Shabbat, Saturday afternoon, when I shut down the desktop and can sit on the couch and read. Checking the Drudge Report can wait.

As a writer, I get better by writing and also by reading. I pick up ideas on styles, research, dialogue and how to craft a story. As much as I enjoy reading, say, instapundit.com, diving into fiction stretches out time and my mind. Books stay with me. Blog posts, however enjoyable, carry less nutrition, even if they do get my synapses firing in socio-political rage at times.

The reading marathon encouraged me to keep up the pace after I returned. I'll step away from the desktop as much as possible. I'm well into Scalzi’s Lock In. On Saturday I picked up three books from the Katonah Public Library. Given that I spent a week in Germany, the choices show my historical bent:

• Judestaat by Simone Zelitch, alt-history about the aftermath of the 1948 creation of the sovereign state of Judenstaat in the Saxony region bordering Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
• A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar, Film noir meets the Holocaust in converging stories. I don’t even know how to describe it.
• If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr. A novel in a series featuring Bernie Gunther, the house detective at Berlin’s Adlon Hotel when the action starts in 1934. Things then jump 20 years to Havana in 1954, where Gunther lives after being booted out of Buenos Aires.

I might race through all of them, or find myself bogged down. None of the books are translations, which means I’m reading straight-up English prose; translations often fail to connect with me, which was the case with the epic Berlin Alexanderplatz. Given enough open vistas of time (time to close down Chrome!) and alertness on my daily train commute, I could get the Germany out of my system and move back to challenging fall reading.

Maybe even Anita Brookner.