One’s personal library is a world of secrets. To quote the French author Françoise Sagan in her 1956 novel, A Certain Smile, “The questions I would have liked to ask people were: Are you in love? What are you reading?”. It is almost impossible to disentangle the two. Getting lost in language is an inward and intimate experience, one that can shape us in the most unexpected and heavenly of ways. And yet, where we read can be just as significant and transportive as the pages we turn to.

There’s one school of thought that reading, a primarily private and solitary act, is best done indoors. Ideally sheltered from every possible distraction, voice, sound and smell. And yet, despite not always being possible on a regular basis, reading outside can be sensorially enriching. Rather than the two competing with one another, combining reading with nature can offer us a greater appreciation of our surroundings. Like Monet capturing his wife, Camille, in a moment of peaceful repose, in the company of a book resting delightfully in her lap and a canopy of lilacs beside her in his 1872 painting, ‘A Woman Reading.’

What a total thrill, say, to read in a verdant garden Anaïs Nin’s lush descriptions of “the smell of jasmine” in Henry and June. Or D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as Constance watches “the daffodils turn golden, in a burst of sun that was warm on her hands and lap. Even she caught the faint, tarry scent of the flowers.” The crystallising moment in Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 short story The Garden Party when “it seemed to her that kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her.”

Summer is a returning: to pleasure for pleasure's sake, to sweet and idle days that stretch fondly ahead, to abundance, to a sweeter version of yourself. Which is perhaps why, when it comes to our most favoured summer reading spots, there is an ineffable joy to coming back to one’s happy place after a period of winterly hibernation. Like a book that you could happily rediscover, have five different editions of, and still find something new to scribble in its margins. There is a beautiful sequence in Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend, with two girls reading Little Women. They meet in the courtyard, reciting passages to one another. They fall in love with its characters and the fantasy world that provides them with a much-needed escape.

Similarly, the heroine in Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest, “read the same books over and over again, in between intervals of distracted daydreaming, in a trance of recognition, and in always the same place, under the big tree that was her refuge, through which the heat pumped like a narcotic”. Of course, part of the euphoria of summer reading is also taking your book on a great escape, discovering a new setting to allow its pages to be warmed by the sun and scented with chlorine like Jane Birkin flicking through Une fortune dans l'armoire by the swimming pool in La Piscine (1969).

With alfresco reading, there are two things happening at once. Here, words are like a cocktail, like a layered JOUISSANCE scent, mixed in with the breeze. You may find yourself momentarily pausing to people-watch, or caught by the fragrance of a nearby flower bed, distracted by the sounds of birds singing or a couple talking intensely next to you. And, for a time, you realise that you are happily split in two, in two places, two timelines, all at once. Absorbed in the world you are reading and the one you’re living, and what a wonderful thing that is.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, as quoted in Beloved Infidel by Sheilah Graham