OK so we have a great time in Sumatra, caldera-exploring, gibbon spotting and volcano climbing, but these activities are the only fun in town unless you like dirty towns and chicken-fried-rice twice a day. Dreaming of Thai food we arrived in Phuket...then what? I get the wildies and am confined to quarters with a pile of immodium and paracetomol for company, tucked up in bed with my Moby-Dick.

Time for the return of the chainsaw-toting Two Line Review, but as these three books have been hard-going, maybe they deserve three lines or more. 'Merely messing with the form', I hear you cry. But these books are so deep I can't touch the bottom and new rules are needed: Two Line Review becomes OK Three-ish But I'm Keeping it Brief. Heavy reading on holiday? When else are you going to do it...:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville ****
Everything you don't need to know about whaling in the mid-1800s in all its tedious attention to detail, and all you do need to know about mental health in modern life: when the nutter gets on the bus it's time to get off, especially if he's the driver. Oh, wait: you can't actually get off, and now he's losing it completely! No changes there then.

Picture This by Joseph Heller *****
Imagine you're Rembrandt painting Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer. Now imagine you're Aristotle in the painting being painted by Rembrandt which is finally to be hung in a gallery in New York City, and wondering why things haven't got much better for anyone except the slaves since Socrates was put to death in ancient Athens. The failings of democracy? Wars that cannot be won? Henry Ford decorated by Nazi Germany? It's all here.

Solaris by Stanislav Lem ****
Sci-Fi genre classic, filmed twice: once by Russian master Tarkovsky at the pace of an England test match, and more recently rather charmlessly by a well-meaning but clumsy George Clooney. The planet Solaris can mess with your head, conjuring up a different kind of madness to Captain Ahab's, as three unfortunate space-station crew-members are tortured by apparitions from their past and their duty to each other...not exactly using the force so much as giving in to the Dark Side.