Rethinking the Beach Read

Is there a more backhanded compliment than calling a book “a good beach read”? Fair or not, the “beach read” label indicates a certain lack of heft—both metaphorically and literally. Certainly nobody really wants to carry a massive new hardback in their tote bag, but does a lightweight book also have to be, you know, fluffy?

The way I see it, part of the beach read’s image problem—it’s the Paris Hilton of the book world—is its association with other forms of leisure reading. Especially damaging are its cousins, the airplane book and the guilty pleasure, so the first thing we ought to do is parse these categories a bit more closely. The beach read is not necessarily a guilty pleasure, an evergreen category with no geographical or seasonal limitations, though teen-age vampires and female protagonists working thankless jobs in the publishing and/or fashion industry are common themes. The beach read is also quite distinct from the airplane read, a genre of book defined not by a particular style or theme but by the limited retail space available at our transportation hubs: only mass-market paperbacks and current best-sellers need apply, thank you very much. There’s a whiff of loneliness and desperation to the airport book, like reading the back of the cereal box when you’re stuck without the morning paper. With a four-hour layover, you’ll take what you can get.

While the airport read feels stifling, the beach read can be wonderfully serendipitous. You find an old paperback in a drawer at a friend’s shore house, or in the lakeside cabin you rented for a last-minute getaway. It’s already been read a few times, it might even be rumpled from water damage, but that’s part of its charm. Back in your workaday life, you might not ordinarily read “Kramer Vs. Kramer,” but in this low-tech setting, it’ll do just fine; it might even be perfect.

The beach read is sometimes a happy accident, but it’s just as often a strategic decision: you’ve got time off, and you want to spend it reading just the right book. We ask our friends for suggestions, or we thumb through our stacks of unread books and try to gauge just which book is right for this particular vacation. Though we think of the beach read as something light and easily digested, I’d argue that vacation is in fact the ideal setting for something slightly more challenging: you’ve got more time than usual, and nothing to do but sit, without distraction, for entire afternoons—unless, of course, you have children you’d like to keep from drowning, in which case you may want to stick to US Weekly. As Michael Chabon wisely told Slate last year, “I don’t change what I read when I go to the beach or on a vacation. I just read more.”

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