A student in a creative-writing course at Hampshire College once dismissed a book I had assigned as “probably OK to read on an airplane or a beach.”
“Why did you say that?” I asked.
“Well, I just sort of . . . read it right through,” he offered.
“Do you mean without struggling?” I asked. “In other words, you enjoyed it?”
Poor fellow. School had taught him that slow-going and nigh-unreadable meant “worthwhile.” “Enjoyable” was suspect. A book you couldn’t put down was, by definition, a page-turner, the lowliest of genres, suitable for that intellectually inferior season, when school is out and reading is up to the reader: summer.
I am here to redefine “beach book,” to elevate it to a higher recreational rung. For some of us vacation means guilt-free time ignoring everything else, with our books chosen as carefully as our cottages, lakes, hotels and bathing suits. What I need on vacation is books that won’t disappoint or leave me stranded; books guaranteed to engage, to satisfy, even to enthrall. Books I will read from start to finish and congratulate myself for choosing.
More is better–generally one book for every two days I’m away. I pack as if I were vacationing inside a biosphere or on a desert isle. How do I know there will be a good bookstore or open library nearby in case of emergency, and that I won’t have to turn to the local drugstore rack or my rental house’s shelf groaning under books on Cape Cod topography by native Cape Codders?
Too anxious? I know why: As a child, vacationing at various cabins by New England lakes without TV sets and most certainly without kiddy programs or nightclub acts, we’d swim, row boats, paddle canoes, fish, play cards, do jigsaw puzzles and read. My father managed to convince the circulation desk staff at the city library in Lowell, Mass., that we needed to take books out for the whole summer, despite the fact that we never had more than two weeks away. (And his need to pile on the books, I’m sure, harks back to World War II, when Pfc. Lipman carried one hardcover book, “Microbe Hunters,” through the trenches.)
I search for quantity and quality, for the sure thing, for satisfaction guaranteed. Dead prose means time spent resenting the weight it took up in a suitcase and wondering what its editor ever saw in it. Unlike at home, where I have the luxury of losing interest and abandoning a book, reading on the road means finding the highest possible ratio of pounds to pleasure.
Now is a good time to start your stockpiling. Go to the bookstore or the library. Read not just the flap copy and the blurbs, but the first few pages.
Read the staff picks and those handwritten shelf-talkers. (You may bring book reviews with you as research, but try to crack the code. Remember that “heavily plotted” means that things happen. Also, “tied up too prettily” means the story gets resolved, that it ends in a satisfying manner rather than stops abruptly with its characters staring into the abyss. “Predictable” might mean, for example, that a woman ends up with a man, a war is won or lost, an ill narrator dies or recovers. Predictability may be the happy opposite of outlandish or contrived.)
As for the source, find a store where people love books and don’t just ring them up, sans affect, as if scanning groceries. (Test: Mention a few titles or authors. If their only response is to type the names into their computer and look blank, you might want to spend your money elsewhere. You want booksellers whose pupils dilate and whose faces light up when you name a title or author they love. The best ones will lead you enthusiastically to other books, place them in your hands, bubble over with recommendations.)
Here’s where you take over: Pick a book, any book, according to any frivolous criterion: by its title, cover, author, or your own whim (e.g., number of pages, author photo, price, grudge against the reviewer who didn’t like it, devotion to Oprah who did). Open it. Go directly to Page 1 and read. If you like it, read on. Is this a voice that can sustain you, and call to you from your canvas beach bag? Be better company than your house guests? Will it keep you up at night and distract you from socializing or exercising? No? Find one that does, then find several more.
Mental snapshots of What I Read and Adored on My Summer Vacations include nearing the end of Jon Krakauer’s enthralling “Into Thin Air” and reading it standing up, between table and chair, transfixed. I remember reading “Florida Straits,” by Laurence Shames, while on vacation in London, and walking from the Tube station to my hotel holding my mass-market Dell paperback in front of my face, five pages to go. I remember reading Madeleine Blais’ “In These Girls Hope Is Muscle” on a cross-country airplane and writing her a postcard when I arrived in California that said, “I may have read a book I’ve enjoyed more than this, but at the moment I can’t think of what it is.”
This summer I’m packing (14 days, i.e., seven books plus insurance) “The Feast of Love,” by Charles Baxter; “Dressing Up for the Carnival,” by Carol Shields; “The Bee Season,” by Myla Goldberg; “The Orphan Game,” by Ann Darby; “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette,” by Judith Thurman; “The Missing World,” by Margot Livesey; “Bad Haircut,” by Tom Perrotta; “Phoenix: A Brother’s Life,” by J.D. Dolan; and “A Home at the End of the World,” by Michael Cunningham.
Books I’ve already devoured and can vouch for include “After Long Silence,” by Helen Fremont; “Lucy Crocker 2.0,” by Caroline Preston; “Dear Will,” by Karl Ackerman; “Host Family,” by Mameve Medwed; “After Lucy,” by Daniel Jones; “Fortune’s Rocks,” by Anita Shreve; “Big Stone Gap,” by Adriana Trigiani; “Dear Exile,” by Hilary Lifton and Kate Montgomery; “Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov),” by Stacy Schiff; “Some Things That Stay,” by Sarah Willis; Frederick Reiken’s (upcoming in August) novel, “The Lost Legends of New Jersey” and his 1998 “The Odd Sea.”
Too much? Why not just stay home and read? I could. Books are the bike I ride, the hole I putt, the fish I catch, the laps I swim, the plane I fly in.
Ahhh, summer.
May yours be long and cooled by the breeze of pages flapping.
