Michael Gove was quite right, in his Times column this week, when he suggested that you should ignore all the newspaper recommendations for summer reading. Well, he was right in every respect but one: except ours, right here.

Gove remarked, correctly, that most beach read round-ups follow fashion as slavishly as the Primark hordes - it's not what you really want to read but what you should be seen reading.

That kind of thing, I'm pleased to say, is not for us here in Books. Like Gove, we decided to ignore the whims of publishers (fond as we are of those good folk) and ask our stellar contributors for something a little different:

Don't tell us the best books for the holidays that have been published this year: tell us, instead, the best books ever to pack in your suitcase. It's only by doing this that we can promise you an unimpeachable selection of absolutely, unequivocally, utterly top-quality reading matter.

Follow our suggestions - whatever your taste, be it biography, fiction, sport or history - and I can guarantee that you won't be disappointed. You won't even damage your back or fall foul of airline weight restrictions - we asked our writers (never mind asked, we told them sternly) to keep their choices to a manageable size. So you can save À la recherche du temps perdu for Christmas.

Asking for choices made with this criteria in mind made me recall some of my own favourite, and sometimes unlikely, summer reads over the years. I recall finding a copy of John Irving's novel A Prayer for Owen Meany at a guesthouse in Thailand: something about the contrast between the setting and the book made me even more enraptured by Irving's tale than I would have been back home, I'm sure.

I revisited my utter misery at summer camp - misery vanquished only by rainy afternoons and the company of Ursula K. Le Guin. The hot New York summer when I first found myself locked in the sea ice of the Antarctic, in company with Roland Huntford's heroic Shackleton.

All great books, of course, are timeless; but readers too often can say that of themselves in quite another way. The days rush by, too crowded to think of turning a page: it's only on holiday when we might have an hour or two to ourselves to disappear into a book. That being the case, there's no point in settling for any less than the best. I wish you all a blissful summer of literary enchantment.

Categories:

Stories, selected by Kate Mosse

Treats, selected by Joanne Harris

Outdoors, selected by Richard Mabey

The Past, selected by Bettany Hughes

The Future, selected by Simon Ings

Laughs, selected by Martin Jarvis

Mysteries, selected by Alexander McCall Smith

Battles, selected by Alan Mallinson

Chillers, selected by Mo Hayder

Lives, selected by Ian Kelly

Sport, selected by Matt Dickinson

Escape, selected by Roty Stewart

Children's books, selected by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Music books, selected by David Hepworth

Audio books, selected by Christina Hardyment

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