Old darling,

Try these two. They are short. One is chilling in it's power, the other, inspiring for it's humanity. You will think and feel. If a longer vacation I might suggest Mann's The Magic Mountain.

How to do good science, is simple. Follow your own path with intensity and obsession and don't pay attention to anyone else. Just keep an eye on them occasionally. The Double Helix might be the go there. Link provided.

Think of me!

Decadently,

Martin

Hi Linda,
A few suggestions:
The Essays of Montaigne, which have been mentioned here a few times. It's not such a small book but combines all of your stated interests at once.
Another suggestion is Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet which could be a fun vacation read.
And then all the books in: Becoming well read.
I'm sure you saw this discussion on: packing for travel - which books should I take (which incidentally was also started by Charles Wellman).

(A side note. You mentioned Linda Charles' post on How to do good science. I'm guessing you underlined it in a hope it will link to it :-) . The way to link to posts, from the help file:
While writing a post you can also Link to other posts. How to refer to another post: notice that when you compose there is an upper half where you can still move around the site. In that upper half on each post there is a toolbar, including the voting (thumbs up, down, etc.) and also "Refer to this message," pressing that puts the highlighted "post" in your post, and it is linked to that post. To find the post you want to refer to quickly you can use the search button on the top right hand corner. Note that the “Refer to this message” is only visible while composing.)

Definitely will be waiting for your photos.

Congratulations!

So there's also a great list in the discussion Virgina links to, here.  Personally, my mistake is always to take books along which fit my mood on leaving. And then at the first whiff of sea breeze...

To throw some names out: Hardy, Felman, Emerson, Plato for fun. Herodotus, or Plutarch's Lives and Vasari's Lives of the artists out of curiosity. I recently read a wonderful book on Abelard and Heloise -- I can't find it on Amazon but I'll link to the letters themselves. How amenable are you to technical reading? The best way to think about science might be to take a good science book, e.g. Darwin or Copernicus.