Where a book is read can be as powerfully-charged as where it's set

For me, it's childhood holidays in the sun I remember when I revisit the chilly climes of Tolkien. What are your unlikely associations?

There are certain places that draw me magnetically back to certain books. My grandparents' home in Durban, which I visited often as a child, always meant humid heat, har-de-dar birds and The Hobbit, in an old edition of my grandmother's that I read cover-to-cover every time I stayed. It was particularly piquant to read this cold-climate story, full of outdoor survival, mountains, forests, and wolves, in the midst of eye-searing sunlight, mangos and nearby muezzins' calls to prayer.

Just as I always ate certain foods in Durban tiny, spicy samosas, boerewors rolls, and Creme Soda, plinking with ice-cubes, in an unhealthy shade of green there were books without which no South African stay could have felt complete. As well as The Hobbit, I also picked repeatedly through the leavings on my mother and uncles' childhood bookshelf, especially Five Little Peppers and How They Grew: the lively, if distressingly moral, account of an impoverished American family's adventures in a little brown house, with a spiteful stove and no money for Christmas. It seems strange that I should have associated such un-African books so strongly with Durban. But if I read them now, in other surroundings, they transport me not into their own worlds, but to the heat, the smell and the insect-life sounds of the context in which I read them so often.

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