These are my recommendations for beach reads this summer

Baltimore’s Pope of Trash, John Waters – that’s Maryland, not West Cork – has a simple yet profound concept of wealth: “My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price, and you’re never around assholes. They’re the two things to really fight for in life.”

Providing you’re not into antiquarian first editions, and you have robust personal boundaries, both of these goals are eminently achievable.

It’s having the time to read that’s the real luxury. At Christmas, we give and receive all kinds of published rubbish: the dreaded stocking-filler genre of live-laugh-love mini-books, not even useful as a door stopper; the cash-in celebrity cook book of crap recipes; the Z-list memoir written by despondent chatbots.

Christmas, the annual period of kerching! for publishers, is a bleak time for readers. And even if we luck out with some good ones, we’re too seasonally disaffected to read them.

Yay then for summer reading. Yet even this prime reading period is overshadowed by an invention almost as grim as the stocking-filler – the beach read.

Every year, the publishing industry foists upon us a snoregasbord of formulaic whimsy-fic, all quirky characters, unreal locations and unlikely plot twists.

Almost as if a bingo full-house of cliches was fed into a beach-read generator, which spits them out like tennis balls.

How about we reclaim the beach read beyond airport thrillers, eight-hundred-page family sagas, and bonkbusters?

The beach read should be like the beach body – it’s whatever you personally bring to the beach.

For me it’s anything by Olivia Laing. Fern Brady’s horribly funny memoir of life as an autistic stripper. Caroline Crampton’s genius history of hypochondria.

Suzi Ronson’s memoir of hanging out and touring with David and Angie Bowie – she’s the one who created the red Ziggy hairdo. Claire Dederer’s history of problematic cultural giants – Picasso, Polanski, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson.

Sophie Elmhirst’s beautiful love story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, the odd couple who were shipwrecked in the Pacific for 117 days in the 1970s, and survived by eating turtles.

Camila Sosa Villada’s tragi-magical tale of the Argentinian trans sex workers who find an abandoned baby in the park, and take him home to care for him.

Juano Diaz’s lyrical Slum Boylike Shuggie Bain but set in a family of gypsy boxers.

Dr Jessica Taylor’s memoir of growing up on a rough estate, escaping her background to become a feminist psychologist.

Professor Katriona O’Sullivan’s magnificent memoir Poor. Anything by Claire Keegan. Anything by Percival Everett, Edward St Aubyn, Rohinton Mistry.

A Fine Balance may require longer reading time than a mini-break, but the chances of you remembering it on your deathbed more than the names of your own children are high.

The real problem with the beach read is not the pulp presented to us as ‘beach reads’, but having a beach bag big enough to shove your chosen beach reads into.

Even diehard fans of the physical book, hard-cornered and dust-jacketed, may find themselves reaching for the Kindle.

There’s no shame in that. Just read. Read, read, read.

Related Posts