Beach Reads

Summer is reading season. (Other good reading seasons: fall, winter, and spring.) Traditionally, we refer to summer books as “beach reads,” and I guess the idea is to lug some frothy paperback to the water’s edge, plunk oneself onto a folding chair, remove as much of one’s clothes as polite society allows, and read as much as you can before the breeze lulls you into slumber. It’s a fine tradition.

Only summer gets its own seasonal literary appellation. I don’t know why that should be. What would a spring book be? Perhaps something hopeful to coincide with the new growth, or perhaps something extra gloomy to complement the rains. As for autumn, a good fall book might be something particularly literary, something to accompany an after-dinner port. Some Man Booker Prize finalist that you get 175 pages into before realizing you hate it.

Summer books, though, are special because the idea of the beach read is that one has time, even when one doesn’t. Time to read and doze and take a dip in whatever body of water you happen to find yourself beside. The beach read suggests idle hours, hours not being spent slathering sunscreen on children or scraping dog poo off your flip-flops or vacuuming sand from the floor. The beach read is, therefore, a fantasy.

But it’s such a good fantasy because it speaks to something innate. The need for leisure. For rest. For an eye skimming a page without concern. No tests will be given. No follow-up emails required. Just a story. A love story, maybe. Or an action-adventure. A mystery involving, perhaps, the French countryside. Something engrossing yet disposable. A used John Grisham paperback the previous renter left behind. Or one of those Elin Hilderbrand books about Nantucket whose covers all feature women reclining on, well, beach chairs.

Personally, I’ll read just about anything at any time but I have a special fondness for middlebrow spy thrillers. Also: lowbrow spy thrillers. As for the highbrow variety, they tend to bore me, but only, for some reason, in this genre. Not so in other forms, but when it comes to the work of spycraft, give me simple stories with uncomplicated heroes over the angst and guilt of Graham Greene. Give me good guys and bad guys. GI Joe vs. Nazis. In this one very particular wedge of my life, I oppose ambiguity.

Who doesn’t love a stock photo of people, facing AWAY from the water, reading books that have no titles?

At the moment, I’m re-reading Daniel Silva’s The Unlikely Spy, which is about the months leading up to the Invasion of Normandy and the enormous deception employed by the Allies to maintain the secrecy of their D-Day landing site. A perfect summer book, especially because I know how it ends.

(We beat the Nazis only to have them return, this time to America, in 2015.)

My entire mood is elevated when I’m deep into a page-turner. Whatever I’m doing during the day, I know that I will eventually have the pleasure of returning to my book, even if it’s just a few pages before bed. The absence of a book in my life leaves me feeling a touch out of sorts, almost like the beginning of a headache. It’s not quite enough to bother you, but it sort of nags at the periphery of your awareness.

The other day, Martha and I dropped by a local church tag sale. There wasn’t much by way of desirable goods, unless one happened to be in the market for a crock pot from 1987. But they did have an abundant assortment of used books, and I picked up a few to tide me over the next few months. Nothing highfalutin at all. Paperbacks. Thrillers. Spy books. Tales of derring-do in the service of something greater than oneself.

So many of these sorts of books have lousy, Machiavellian politics. How many have used some version of the quote “We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence upon those who would harm us”? Answer: a lot, and the politics behind the unattributed quotation (it wasn’t Churchill and it wasn’t Orwell) open the door to all manner of terrible bloody mayhem.

I love it. I love the carnage and the (mostly) men who inflict it. I love double-agents garroted in underground parking garages, drug dealers pushed from rooftops, the good guys suffering various bullet wounds before being tended to by murmuring nurses who, invariably, end up falling for them. I love the whole stupid genre comprised of books read and instantly forgotten; in fact, it took me over a hundred pages before I even realized I was re­-reading this particular Silva book. Once I realized, I didn’t care since I have only the vaguest recollection of reading it the first time.

Keep a book nearby. In your beach bag, maybe, or on your bedside table. Not necessarily because you need to read more, but because it’s nice to have something calling to you during the day. Not in a guilty way. More like a windchime. Ah yes, you might think when you raise your head in between various annoying life chores, I’ve still got that book to read. And that thought alone might be enough to bring you some little cheer, no matter the season.