Seems like the news we get just goes from bad to worse. “Kodachrome/ They give us those nice bright colours/ They give us the greens of summers/ Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,” Paul Simon sang, but those summery greens have gone the way of the Polaroid since Kodak announced on Monday that it would be discontinuing Kodachrome film stock. So where to go for the rich ocean blues and sunlit golds once found in those slides? When it comes to summer reading, your imagination is the only place.

Kodak’s 75-year-old film was a classic, so why not turn to some classics this year? For richness, depth and brilliant vigour you can’t do much better than Robertson Davies — is it just me, or have we forgotten about Davies, a hero of 20th-century North American literature? The Deptford Trilogy is the middle of his three trilogies and comprises the novels Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders. Each book circles round a mysterious death, viewing it from different perspectives and bringing Davies’s understanding of human nature, his love of myth and symbol — and his eternally light touch — to bear. A joy.

I discovered Davies around the same time I discovered John Irving, another novelist of Klieg-lit ebullience. A death also starts out my favourite of his novels, A Prayer for Owen Meany, when the strange little Owen accidentally kills his best friend’s mother and comes to believe he is an instrument of God. It’s hilarious and heartbreaking all at once, a book of love and faith. His new novel will reach us in the autumn.

Irving makes you look at the world in a new way; so does Ted Mooney, whose extraordinary first novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets (easily available second-hand), came out in 1982. In many ways it prefigures some of the ills of the 21st century (who else had thought of the idea of information sickness back then? Apart from Orwell, of course), but it’s a brisk, thought-provoking read.

The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads

Choose from a rich haul of novels and thrillers (including two prizewinners) or fill your mind with the sharpest new nonfiction

BACKGROUND

• Summer reading: fiction roundup

• Summer reading: children's books

• Summer reading: audio books

• Summer reading

Summer reading

The Sunday Times top 12 choices in fiction and nonfiction

Related Internet Links

• Buy the books here

Summer reading: fiction

A perfect day would start in the winding streets of Barcelona and end with a classic Agatha Christie mystery

BACKGROUND

• Erica Wagner chooses her favourite summer books

• David Aaronovitch reviews the best history books for your holiday reading

• Tim Teeman reviews the best books to take on holiday

• Val McDermid reviews the latest thrillers

BACKGROUND

• Summer reading for children

• Summer reading: biography/memoir

• Lisa Tuttle reviews the latest science fiction and fantasy novels

• Summer reading: fiction that you loved on vacation

BACKGROUND

• Summer reading: music

• Summer reading: outdoors

• Summer reading: travel

• Summer listening: audiobooks

Forty years ago, of course, the human race launched itself, if not quite to another planet, then at our nearest neighbour, the Moon. I have at last got round to reading Andrew Smith’s remarkable tale of his attempt to seek out the men who walked on its surface, Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth. It is a mix of reportage and meditation, a tricky combo to pull off, but Smith manages admirably. This is not just a book for space nuts: with humanity and humour it addresses the need to explore, the desire to recapture the past, the dream of what used to be called “progress”. His meetings with the surviving astronauts of the American space programme are moving and memorable.

Coming brutally down to earth, one final choice, David Simon’s The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood. Simon is, of course, co-creator of The Wire, that most terrifyingly addictive of television shows — though he wrote recently in this section that he was a little dismayed that his depiction of the American inner city had found a more receptive audience in Britain than it had in his native land. Go behind The Wire and read The Corner — and be grateful that you’re able to go on holiday at all.

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy