I’m in the process of moving, and many of my books remain packed. So I was going to do these recommendations sans-text. But, after giving it more thought, I felt that would be quite lazy and irresponsible of me. ]]> Here’s the 7th and final part of our Literary Beach Books series. Find the other parts here.

I’m in the process of moving, and many of my books remain packed. So I was going to do these recommendations sans-text. But, after giving it more thought, I felt that would be quite lazy and irresponsible of me. Using the Internetz, I took the middle path: for each book, I went to the Amazon.com “Surprise Me!” feature and chose a line from the randomly selected page to give you a sense of what the novel’s about.

Lunar Park, by Brett Easton Ellis

What happens when Brett Easton Ellis moves to the suburbs? Very, very, bad things. Think Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road meets Stephen King’s The Shining.

The plot is pretty simple: our narrator, Brett Easton Ellis, recovering addict and literary celebrity, lives in a haunted house with a semi-famous wife and a twelve year old kid whose friends keep disappearing. The ghosts are many: his career, his fictional characters, a stuffed animal called a Terby, his own father. As Brett’s mid-life crisis intensifies, so do the night terrors. We turn the pages to see how he survives.

For my money, this is Ellis’s greatest novel to date. It’s also my favorite “literary novel” of the past few years. I wish I’d never read it so I could read it again this summer. Like all of Ellis’s books, really, it’s a modern day horror story, characters tormented by emptiness, confusion, nihilism, Prada, ambition, family, expectations and, this time around, actual ghosts.

Surprise Me!: “It was an indictment of not only the way of life I was familiar with but also—I thought rather grandly—of the Reagan ‘80’s, and, more indirectly, of Western Civilization at the present moment.”

Platform, by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq is one of those authors who specializes in pissing people off. I don’t know why the easily offended take the bait every time—some folks must get as much joy from righteous indignation as the provocateurs get from provoking it. Over the years, I’ve recommended this book to a number of people. The response is either “Thanks, a masterpiece!” or “You’re a sick bastard for even thinking I would like this.” So be warned.

The narrator is a French bureaucrat, the caustic Michel Renault. Michel thinks that the only way Western men can find pleasure in sex is to find submissive Asian women in Thai massage parlors. Michel sort of realizes he’s wrong after he meets Valerie, a successful and rich middle-aged French chick.

Beneath the book’s controversies (the above mentioned sex tourism, as well as Islam, orgies, the death of Western civilization, etc.), Platform is a powerful love story between Michel and Valerie. The two find each other, and within each other they find the limits of pleasure. The book pretends to take the tone of what one could call a typical French post structuralist “modern life has no meaning so smoke another Gauloise” attitude. But that’s Houellebecq being clever. The book falls on the side of meaningfulness, just not where we’d expect. (At a sex resort.) I won’t give away the ending, except to say that it’s worth reading to the final page. And it takes place on the beach.

Surprise Me!: “She was getting quite angry too; I could sense that it wouldn’t be long before she mentioned human rights.”

Absurdistan, by Gary Shteyngart

I read Absurdistan slowly because I wanted to savor the humor. The book is that funny, especially if you’re ever had the misfortune of spending time in any country with a ‘Stan suffix. (Or an ‘aq syllable, for that matter.) It’s essentially a send up of all the clichéd and way too serious émigré and exile novels you’ve ever read. At the same time, it’s a hilarious tale of America’s cluelessness and excessive meddling, the massive stupidity and greed in the local Absurdsistan-like cultures that make them ripe for meddling, and the uber-rich Russian oligarchy.

It’s the Catch-22 for the age of American Empire. (I just noticed that the Washington Post review also compares it to Catch-22, so my observation here is less than original. A few more Googles tells me that everybody (except Michiko Kakutani) seems to love the book. Despite the daily NYT pan, it was named by the Times as one of the Ten Best in 2006.)

I didn’t need “Surprise Me!” for this one—I knew my favorite line memory. “During the thirties and forties, Stalin had killed half my family. Arguably the wrong half.”

Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi

In Old Man’s War, retirement is when the action starts. The brilliant conceit: Earth, engaged in a number of intergalactic battles, meets its recruitment goals in the Colonial Defense Forces by signing up retirees who’ve agreed to a genetic treatment that makes them superhuman kick-ass warriors. The treatment also allows them to live for generations more (as long as they don’t get killed). Our hero is John Perry, an everyman of sorts, if you will, who finds himself in a series of classic Starship Trooperesque situations.

It’s the best science fiction book I’ve read in the past few years, and I’d put it in my personal top ten sci-fi novels of all time. Yes, all time. Plus, it’s got a bunch of sequels, so you can lose yourself for a good week or two in Mr. Scalzi’s universe.

Surprise Me!: “Viveros waited for the cease-fire order, walked over to the puddle that was left of Bender, and started stamping it furiously. ‘How do you like your peace now, motherfucker?’ she cried as Bender’s liquefied organs stained the lower half of her legs.”

Having just moved from Boston to the Atlantic coast of Florida, my ideas of beach reading will have to be redefined. Until now, the term has been synonymous with “vacation reading”—books I want to bring with me to places that ]]> Here’s part 6 of our Literary Beach Books series. Find the other parts here.

Having just moved from Boston to the Atlantic coast of Florida, my ideas of beach reading will have to be redefined. Until now, the term has been synonymous with “vacation reading”—books I want to bring with me to places that are warmer and happier than all the cloudy northern cities I’ve called home. It’s not the beach itself that matters, it’s the atmosphere. Las Vegas, situated squarely in the middle of Hell, is where I’ve done the lion’s share of my beach reading. Now, with actual beaches just down the block from where I lay my head at night, every book on my shelves has the potential to be a true beach book.

Here are five that made the trip with me:

The Fool’s Progress, by Edward Abbey

The great Ed Abbey called this book his “fat masterpiece.” Fat it is, checking in at just under 500 pages. Read them all. In order. And then read them all again, because this is my all-time favorite novel, and it very well may become yours, too.

Published in 1988, this is Abbey’s swan song, a book he poured himself into for years. It begins in “the dim inane of Tucson, Arizona,” where Henry Holyoak Lightcap, whose wife has just split on him for the last time, raises a .357 Magnum and blasts away at his loud-running Frigidaire.

Henry, with nothing left to lose and hiding a dark secret inside himself, decides to embark on one final trip back home to Virginia, an odyssey that takes him from his beloved Southwest through the middle of the country and into the Appalachia of his youth. In his dying truck with his dying dog, Henry stops to say last goodbyes to friends along the way as he reflects on a life full of love found and lost, authority scorned at every turn, and an abiding love for and awe of nature.

This book will make you laugh and cry at the same time. This is as close as Abbey got to autobiography, so if you’re fascinated with the real-life character, then you’ll feel the same about Henry Lightcap. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Living to Be 100, by Robert Boswell

I’ve gone on and on about this book and this writer before, even on Chamber Four, but that’s not going to stop me from putting this on my list. Of the eleven pieces in this story collection, five of them are memorable after just one read. But you won’t read them only once. Pay special attention to “Glissando,” “Brilliant Mistake,” and the title story. Then read the rest of Boswell’s oeuvre, starting with the novel Crooked Hearts and working your way to his new story collection, The Heydey of the Insensitive Bastards.

City in Love, by Alex Shakar

Here are seven stories set in New York City in the year 1 B.C., each of them a “modern” spin on a book from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Junk Man in “A Million Years From Now” builds a sculpture of his ideal woman and falls in love with it—instead of ivory, like Pygmalion, he builds her out of trash he finds on the city streets. Danny Waxman in “Waxman’s Sun” learns that his father is a sort of Sun god, but instead of driving the sun chariot like Phaeton, Danny conducts his father’s superheated subway car through the city’s tunnels. Ceyx and Alcyon were turned into birds, but Lou and Fiona become alligators who roam the city’s sewers in a father/son tale entitled “On Morpheus, Relating to Orpheus.”

(I realize that the above makes it sound as if I’ve read Ovid. Far be it from me to rob you of that belief.)

The idea sounds cutesy, but the execution is not. Shakar shows us that humanity’s desire for love, our fear of loneliness, and our penchant for tripping ourselves up hasn’t changed since Ovid’s time. Although the stories are set two millennia ago, Shakar’s city is instantly recognizable, a present-day New York filled with modern people longing for more from life. Like Howie in “The Sky Inside,” who escapes into a natural history museum at night in a moment related to us by the Chinese man who operates the planetarium projector: “And he say, You know something wrong when you have to go inside building to see star at night. It is all ass on backward, he say, forest inside, jungle inside, sea inside, sky inside.”

If you enjoy this collection, check out Shakar’s novel The Savage Girl.

On Writing, by Stephen King

This is one of King’s best books, part memoir, part how-to guide. King tells us of his humble beginnings as a writer, how he endured all of the rejection and humiliation that we all must go through to make it in this business, and then he takes us briefly into his successes before getting into the meat of the book—his ideas on what every writer needs in his or her “toolbox.” King states his basic premise thusly: “While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.”

It’s a quick and entertaining read from a writer who, say what you will about his work, knows a thing or two about how to write readable fiction. At the very least, you’ll come away from it thinking twice about those disgusting little adverbs.

Where Is Joe Merchant?, by Jimmy Buffett

In a little-known repercussion of Y2K, Jimmy Buffett decided to cash in on his own legacy and become all about the Benjamins (go ahead, check out his disgusting slot at your local big-chain record store). Before that, though, the man made some fine music—and wrote one hell of an entertaining novel.

Frank Bama, a seaplane pilot still in love with the one that got away, is in such financial straits that he can barely afford to gas up his plane, when along comes Trevor Kane, heiress to a hemorrhoid ointment empire (“the asshole fortune”) and sister of Joe Merchant, a rock star who is presumed dead but pops up Elvis-like in the most unusual places. Trevor wants to hire Frank to help her track down Desdemona, a psychic who claims to know Joe’s whereabouts. The only thing that keeps Frank from leaping at the opportunity is that Trevor Kane is his one that got away.

Beach reading + Buffett = cliché, but I don’t care. This is a damn good book. It’s light and airy, laugh-out-loud funny, and filled with colorful characters that come alive on the page. They’re not thin, flat, or shallow—we really get to know Frank and Trevor as they bounce from one Caribbean island to another, and with them we get swept up in the tide of, as the book jacket reads, “psychos, whackos, pirates and dictators.”

I’ve read this novel six or seven times, and will continue to return to it. If you like Buffett’s style, check out a piece entitled “Take Another Road” from his story collection, Tales From Margaritaville.

And then avoid anything else he’s published since.

Like Eric, I’ve never read at the beach. I am easily distracted by rocks and shells and washed-up jellyfish, so all of my beach visits have found me walking around, swimming, and walking around some more, with precious little time to ]]> Here’s part 5 of our Literary Beach Books series. Find the other parts here.

Like Eric, I’ve never read at the beach. I am easily distracted by rocks and shells and washed-up jellyfish, so all of my beach visits have found me walking around, swimming, and walking around some more, with precious little time to sit and read. Instead, I prefer a park for my summer retreats. Parks are no less distracting than beaches, I suppose, but I find breeze and grass and trees and fountains and strolling couples more relaxing than the beach’s perpetually crashing waves, and therefore more suitable for a few hours of casual reading. These, then, are my five Literary Park Books, no blanket or swimsuit required.

Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin

Steve Martin’s memoir of his development and eventual success as a stand-up comedian is a tell-all, but with the author’s craft, rather than sex or various other scandals, as its subject. Scandals aren’t ignored, but they’re offered as subplots to the larger story of how Martin grew from quaint vaudeville-esque gigs at Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm to the top-selling comedy act in the world, and why he eventually turned that success into a film career, leaving stand-up behind forever.

And though Martin’s voice is not particularly warm as he recounts living amid his parents’ fraught living dynamic, doomed romances (including Dalton Trumbo’s daughter Mitzi) neither is it bitter or vindictive. Rather, Martin comes across as merely curious about this aspect of his life and career, and seems to share the reader’s surprise when the mélange of magic, absurdist humor, and banjo tunes that made up his act gradually connects with an audience. If you’ve ever wanted to be a comedian, or understand the mechanics behind the five-minute sets you enjoy on late night talk shows, this is essential reading.

Black Postcards, by Dean Wareham

If Born Standing Up is a peaceful nostalgia trip, then Black Postcards is a therapy session made public. Wareham—formerly of slowcore progenitors Galaxie 500 and indie stalwarts Luna, and presently one half of Dean & Britta—offers a more comprehensive memoir, taking the reader from his childhood in New Zealand through his education at Harvard, careers with two iconic bands, failed relationships of all sorts, to the present.

As in Born Standing Up, much of the narrative is spent on the road, recreating the chaos and giddy surreality of being in a band. More so than Martin, though, Wareham wants you to feel the pain and excitement along with him. Consequently, Black Postcards is somewhat penitent, as if Wareham were unburdening an entire discography’s worth of lust, self-loathing, regret, and swagger in one fell swoop.

Despite this, Black Postcards is never heavy. Even at his nadir, Wareham is charming; his sentences are lovingly structured, and the occasional lapse into over-educated artifice is coy, not smug. This is writing that’s meant to be read aloud, preferably in Wareham’s dry, somewhat aristocratic tone.

Black Postcards also presents a perfect multi-media summer reading opportunity; pick up Galaxie 500′s This Is Our Music and Luna’s Penthouse to soundtrack your reading, and check out Matthew Buzzell’s excellent documentary about Luna’s final tour, Tell Me Do You Miss Me.

All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly

A twelve-issue mini-series that stretched over nearly three years, All Star Superman is less Morrison and Quietly’s love letter to the character than a rejoinder to critics, writers, and readers who complain, cynically, that Superman comics can’t be interesting because the character is too powerful or too moral. Superman’s value, they argue, isn’t his power or his compassion, but rather the intersection of the two.

The set-up is something like Superman’s last will and testament; exposed to an overdose of solar radiation by Lex Luthor in the first issue, Superman has one year to live. As ever, he fills this time by balancing the needs of his personal life with his devotion to Earth’s population; he (awkwardly) negotiates his relationship with Lois Lane as both Superman and Clark Kent, loses his powers and becomes trapped on Htrae, the Bizarro world, reflects on the loss of his adoptive father, and battles Solaris, the Tyrant Sun, among others.

While the action, humor, and high-concept adventures are a large part of the appeal, All Star Superman‘s strongest moments are quiet and humane (issue 10, in particular, delivers an emotional gut-check the likes of which rarely come in four-color comics.) And let’s not forget the art; Quietly’s lovingly detailed and expressive pencils mix well with both the whiz-bang pace and emotional core of Morrison’s script.

As of now All Star Superman is available in two hardcover volumes (volume 1 is also available in paperback; volume 2 should follow in February 2010) but the single issues shouldn’t be too hard to find with a little patient scouting at your local comic shop or online.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle, by Michael Kupperman

The comics collected in the five issues of Tales Designed to Thrizzle are the kind Andre Breton might’ve made, had he grown up on a steady diet of EC comics, Saturday morning cartoons, and Monty Python. They mash noir fiction, crime procedurals, melodrama, history, and advertisements for “real” x-ray glasses and subscriptions to Grit into a lost corner of the Eisenhower era where Albert Einstein and Mark Twain are the new Hope and Crosby, and the schism between Sex Holes and Sex Blimps threatened to tear the country apart. The characters in Kupperman’s strips are nearly always yelling, punching each other, crashing through windows, questioning their own motives, and dying; the logic of early comic books taken to its extreme.

Kupperman published the first issue of Tales through Fantagraphics in 2005, and the fifth issue was just released in May, so the schedule isn’t anything to set your watch by. However, Fantagraphics will release a hardcover, collecting the first four issues in full-color instead of the original two-tone, in July. But if you’re seeking a Kupperman fix don’t feel bound to periodicals; his blog Here Comes Madness is regularly updated with bits of strips and the occasional video, and his Twitter feed is like the library of Babel as read by Daffy Duck.

The House that Trane Built: the Story of Impulse Records, by Ashley Kahn

Coming off two successful pop histories of jazz that tackled individual albums (A Love Supreme: the Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album and Kind of Blue: the Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece) Ashley Kahn widened his scope with The House that Trane Built, covering a fifty-two year span and touching on the careers of dozens of musicians, producers, photographers, and executives who contributed to the rise of Impulse Records. Kahn writes for a wider audience as well, introducing every major figure and movement with enough background that non-jazz fans can keep up while offering aficionados the unique criticism and behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

The House that Trane Built is organized into seven chapters that roughly correspond to the tenures of different label heads, most notably Creed Taylor and Bob Thiele who, along with John Coltrane, emerge as the guiding spirits of the label, turning it from a pet project into a significant influence on the course of jazz in the latter half of the 20th century. Each chapter follows the main narrative of the comings and goings of artists and producers, recording sessions, and the overall business plan, interrupted by occasional two-page examinations of particularly notable records from the Impulse catalog.

If that sounds like a book-length summer playlist, then you’ve hit on part of the appeal; immersion in the Impulse story leads naturally to supplementary listening (Impulse even released a soundtrack album and “best of’ compilations of ten of the artists featured in the book). It’s synergy at its most blatant, and most logical.

To be honest, I’m not much of a beach reader, more of a beach sleeper, wave watcher, and occasional bocce competitor.  I always bring a book with me for the moments when I’m awake and haven’t yet decided which ice cream novelty ]]> Here’s part 4 of our Literary Beach Books series.  Find the other parts here.

To be honest, I’m not much of a beach reader, more of a beach sleeper, wave watcher, and occasional bocce competitor.  I always bring a book with me for the moments when I’m awake and haven’t yet decided which ice cream novelty I want from the snack shack, but my selections for these outings tend towards short stories, essays, and poetry, books I can consume piecemeal and ponder as I slip in and out of consciousness with the surging and receding surf.

If that sounds like something you’d like to take to the beach, then read on; if not, read on anyways.  You might get some good ideas for reading you could do any old time, and I’ll throw in a novel at the end just for good measure.

Like You’d Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard

Just a quick glance at the acknowledgements should be enough to let you know what kind of a collection you’ve got in your hands when you pick up Like You’d Understand, Anyway.  You’ll find books and articles on geology, Greek tragedy, the Chernobyl disaster, the Yeti, and the French Revolution.  In short: it’s the perfect book for a reader with a wild curiosity about everything.

These pages are full of fascinating, factual gems, but the appeal of the stories goes far beyond satisfying simple curiosity.  Shepard turns a sharp intelligence on his subjects and their challenges.  He renders even his most misguided or monstrous narrators with a markedly human touch, creating characters as compelling as the bizarre and sometimes all too familiar situations in which they find themselves.  Each of the eleven stories is told in the first person, and each one left me feeling like a total stranger had just confided in me, offering up the best and worst for which he could be judged.

Full of dry, brutal humor and sincere sympathy for people facing the limits of their own knowledge and ignorance, this collection makes you think about things like cruelty and responsibility at the same time that it leaves you wondering that an earthquake or a scorpion could have ever really been so big.

Strange Pilgrims, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This slim volume of stories from one of the world’s masters of craft relies heavily on a light touch.  Marquez presents serious themes in fable-like tales about the travails of ghosts and travelers finding their way in the world.  From the story of a man sitting next to a beautiful woman on a trans-Atlantic flight to the story of Frau Frieda who earns her living by selling her dreams, this collection traces a path through the mundane to the fantastic and ties the two inextricably together.

To be honest, this is pretty typical Marquez, so if you couldn’t get into his other books, this likely isn’t for you.  But if you enjoyed his novels, or maybe his other short stories, then this is definitely worth throwing in your beach bag.  It comes with a strange prologue in which Marquez tries to explain something not just about his process as a writer, but about the process that lead to these stories, this exact number of them, in this collection.  It’s an interesting introduction, part confession, part warning, and a must read for any fans of Marquez.

The White Album, by Joan Didion

While the title essay is undoubtedly one of the highlights of American non-fiction, it shouldn’t overshadow the other lesser-known essays in this collection.  Mostly shorter pieces which appeared in a wide variety of publications throughout the seventies, these essays engage sixties culture and the women’s movement, California and its place at the end of American history, the politics of water and the uses of nostalgia.  Didion’s eye for detail keeps each piece lively, even when the tone turns melancholy, and the precision of her language makes it nearly impossible not to re-read certain passages aloud for the sheer satisfaction of hearing something so well put.

It might be easy for a reader of my generation to dismiss some of these pieces as dated, and in some ways they are.  For me, that’s always been part of their appeal.  For a reader born after 1980, reading these essays is an education in the really not so distant past, a past that remains active in today’s political discourse, and which shows no sign of slipping quietly into the halls of history.  From gender and class issues to the myriad myths of the American dream, The White Album, even with all its dated cultural references, remains prescient.

Selected Poems, by Derek Walcott, edited by Edward Baugh

I’m told there are better ways to read Walcott than reading this particular selection, but this is the volume I happen to have, and I have taken it to a number of different beaches since I picked it up.  For the uninitiated reader, it’s definitely a good introduction to the range of voices and concerns in Walcott’s poetry.  It begins with some of his earliest published works and continues up to selections from The Prodigal, his recent and more than partly autobiographical book length poem.

Walcott’s verse ranges from formal to free, from short lyrics to epics with long unwinding lines.  While he is known mainly as a Caribbean poet, his work wanders widely through the history and culture of numerous traditions.  The selections from The Fortunate Traveler and The Bounty include some of my favorite poems of all time, like the title poem from the former, and the 14^th section of the latter which begins “Never get used to this; the feathery, swaying casuarinas.”

The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles

It’s possible that I think of this book as a beach book not because of anything in particular about the plot or the subject matter, but because I borrowed a copy from a friend who had just returned from a trip to the southern coast of Spain.  Reading it in bed one night, I found myself dusted with the fine sand trapped in the pages from her travels.  I know, at least, that it struck someone besides myself as good beach reading.

Most of the book is set on the English coast in the town of Lyme.  Part romantic mystery, part social-sexual history of the Victorian era, The French Lieutenant’s Woman follows the affairs of Charles Smithson, his fiancé Ernestina, and Sarah Woodruff, the mysterious referent of the title.  The story, simple as it is, a man torn between two women, held my attention effortlessly.  Full of suspense and intrigue, and punctuated with some startling authorial interruptions, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is an easy book to read, and a hard one to forget or ever stop thinking about.

Last summer I thoughtlessly brought the book I happened to be reading along with me to the beach. When a friend asked what my book, Blood Meridian, was about, instead of saying “It’s pretty much the most violent and disturbing ]]> Here’s part 3 of our Literary Beach Books series. Find the other parts here.

Last summer I thoughtlessly brought the book I happened to be reading along with me to the beach. When a friend asked what my book, Blood Meridian, was about, instead of saying “It’s pretty much the most violent and disturbing book about murder I’ve come across since American Psycho, another terrifying and gruesome book I’ve read for some reason,” I told her it was a book about cowboys and Indians fighting around the Mexican border just before the Civil War.

Then, laying on my towel and trying to read McCarthy’s prose despite the sun, the sand, the hot weather and the good-looking people wearing almost nothing a few feet away, I wished I actually had brought the book she’d imagined from my answer -a fun, easy read- along with me instead. I think I was ill-prepared for beach reading because to me “beach book” means “stupid book.”

A beach book is a summer block-buster starring Nicholas Cage, it’s top 40 radio, it’s reality TV. It’s something you enjoy knowing full-well that it’s stupid, as a kind of indulgence. For some reason I can watch a stupid move and listen to stupid music (in doses) and I can stomach a little reality TV, but reading a bad book just makes me angry.

I’m sure people who have strong opinions about movies, music, and television have a similar problem. So I’m presenting a few “beach books” as I define them: books that are fun to read, can entertain without a requiring huge amount of concentration, and are still “literary” enough to be enjoyed by someone who likes real books, too.

The first two beach book picks I have are actually selections from two authors’ catalogs:

Graham Greene’s “Entertainments.”

Graham Greene was such a snob that he even condescended to himself. In the front of his books Greene lists his fiction under two categories: “Novels” and “Entertainments.” In the “Novel” category you will find the books he is most famous for, like The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Power and the Glory. All serious, literary works. But fortunately Greene also wrote other novels that fall into the crime, spy, and thriller genres, throughout his career. These books, however less-significant he judged them, are often as good as the novels he deemed more worthy.

One of Greene’s great triumphs is that he eventually managed to merge these two divergent strains of his writing into works like The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana, but his earlier forays into genre writing stay closer to their forms. And, given the author, they are much better than the average novels in their genres. I would recommend two especially: The Ministry of Fear and A Gun for Sale (both pictured).

If you are feeling particularly literary, you can also enjoy Brighton Rock, The Quiet American, or The Power and the Glory as entertaining literature.

Early Kurt Vonnegut
My second author for literate beach-reading is Kurt Vonnegut. Like the Greene books above, Vonnegut’s novels are fun, well-written, and still “literary.”  I think Vonnegut’s earlier books, such as Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, and, my favorite, Cat’s Cradle, are especially well suited to the kind of reading one does on a beach.  These books, with Mother Night excluded, are firmly set in the science fiction genre. With Vonnegut, of course, the novels are more than just thrilling scifi yarns. They are allegories, warnings, and predictions, too. And often funny as hell. (Player Piano and Cat’s Cradle also pictured.)

Some collections of Vonnegut’s non-fiction work, like A Man Without a Country or Palm Sunday, will also make great beach reads, as the essays are short, punchy, and hilarious.

I have to include a more recent book as my last pick. I’m sure you’ve all ready it, but Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi is just about as perfect beach-read for the literate as there is. The short chapters, the plot of the book, the great writing on a sentence-to-sentence level all make it a lot of fun to read at the beach. It won’t put you to sleep as you read in the sun: not the subject or the writing.

The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

You can still read your normal books this summer, of course (If you’re like me you probably read from a couple books at a time anyway) but keep these in mind for your beach-browsing. Save Bolano’s 2666 for your nights at home. And know that whichever literate beach book you chose, you will be as thoroughly entertained as the rest of the crowd while they consume their disposable books.

And just imagine how appealing you will be to the passing English buff, a very attractive member of the opposite sex, who happens to glance at the cover of your book, a raft among a sea of big, shiny hard-cover books, recognizes a favorite authors, stops in his or her flip-flops, and smiles.

On my last vacation, I happily trucked through all four Twilight books, but I don’t consider them nor most other airport bookstore type books “literary.” When I read literary books, I tend to carry a pencil and write notes to myself ]]> Here’s part 2 of our Literary Beach Books series. Find the other parts here.

On my last vacation, I happily trucked through all four Twilight books, but I don’t consider them nor most other airport bookstore type books “literary.” When I read literary books, I tend to carry a pencil and write notes to myself in the margins, but that’s not too practical at the beach.

So the literary beach books below are somewhere in the middle: smart, but the not type that demands unbroken concentration. These books all have strong characterization and a great sense of adventure; they have that magnetic, I-want-to-get-back-to-my-book factor. Finally, all five of these can be finished during one day at the beach. And away we go…

Little Bee, by Chris Cleave

Little Bee really blew me away when I read it a few months back. It is accessible without too much complex language, yet at once seems incredibly insightful. This is a tough balance to achieve, and much of the credit goes towards the careful back and forth of two narrators with two very different and shifting outlooks on life.

Beyond the two narrators, the rest of the characters are rendered nicely, and the young boy of the family (called Batman because he refuses to remove his Batman pajamas since his father’s death ) is both adorable and heartbreaking–and funny, constantly mis-conjugating verbs in front of his editor mother.

A novel about a Nigerian refugee going to live with two Britons she met during a brief and incredibly traumatic event, the subject matter can be tough to handle. The book casts an intense yet not quite accusatory glare on the mentality of the west toward Africa, and vice versa. It certainly opens the readers to some close inspection of just the sort of lives we live and how our ideas of misery and terror are so different from those of our fellow humans. Mostly due to the strength of Little Bee (the character) as a narrator, the book retains an uplifting and moving outlook rather than succumbing to the dreariness you might expect.

Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov

I’ve harped on why everyone should read Lolita a lot on the site lately so I’ll keep this brief.  I bring it up constantly for good reason: in my opinion this is the best novel of the last 100 years, if not ever. The language contained within is second to none. If you find yourself on a beach where you don’t mind reading aloud to yourself (or to someone else, provided it’s not a twelve-year-old girl), I can’t recommend enough that you read Lolita aloud. Virtually every line is so well rendered that your tongue will almost dance in your mouth. You’ll taste the language, and it tastes good.

Despite the subject matter, the tone of the book is perfect for a beach read. The pacing plays into this greatly. The first half of the book is fancy and desire and lazy summer days, and the second half has a page-turning adventure, perfect to keep you reading just that much longer before heading inside from the beach.

The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan)

This is my go-to beach book.  I love the zaniness of early twentieth century Irish writing, and in this novel, O’Brien takes the cake.  His writing shares many similarities with his much larger contemporaries such as Joyce and Beckett.

This book requires a little bit more mental exercise than the others on the list, mainly because it is so wacky, to the point of hallucinatory, that it can be confusing at points.  It is wildly hilarious and adventurous though, so worth the extra effort.  It’s hard for me to explain the plot without giving things away, but the story is a murder mystery cum existential romp. And it’ll make you wary of rusty bicycle pumps.

For all you LOST fans, season 2 (with Desmond pushing the button) borrowed so heavily from this book that they had a shot of the book on Desmond’s cot.

Being Dead, by Jim Crace

This one’s a bit of a morbid pick, so I’ll give you the premise right off the bat in case you want to skip forward.  A middle-aged couple is murdered on a secluded beach, and the story follows the unfound bodies as they decompose.  This is done with a detachment from emotion: while the descriptions of the decomposition are graphic, they are not prurient but more clinical and naturalistic, akin to a nature documentary or a crime scene investigation show.

The novel also jumps back in time, telling the story of the couple’s life together from the point at which they first met on the same beach where there bodies will decompose. This presents a nice opportunity for the reader to extrapolate the emotion from the living characters and assign value to the story of their deaths.  It is a brilliant juxtaposition that really highlights the fragility of life. By showing us the living, thinking, feeling humans and the lifeless, decomposing matter that, too, is part of a system larger than the individual, Crace creates a unique and ultimately beautiful love story.  Just don’t read it on an unpopulated beach.

The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart

I wanted to include a good YA book on this list, as they provide a lot of the character and adventure that make for a great beach read. It was between this and Moribito, but ultimately The Mysterious Benedict Society, with its similarities to Roald Dahl seemed a bit more literary to me. Much like with Dahl’s books, eccentricities abound in this novel.  When an evil genius uses a school for gifted children as a launching point for his diabolical plan to brainwash the entire planet, four youth (dubbed the Mysterious Benedict Society) are sent in as spies to sabotage the plans and save the world.

Each of the children has a unique gift (reasoning, memory, gadgetry, empathy) and together they solve plenty of puzzles and mysteries as the book progresses.  The puzzles are fun and invite the reader into countless guessing and whodunnit scenarios. Beyond the titular four, there are many madcap and idiosyncratic characters in this book that really make it a treat to read. It is cleverly plotted and very well paced, and adults and children alike with have a fun time with the adventure before them.

So read away, dear vacationers, leave recommendations of other great beach books in the comments, or even write us a review.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be doing a series of recommendations for (semi-)intellectual summer reading. Each of these posts will suggest four or five enjoyable page-turners that won’t leave you feeling intellectually lobotomized like certain popular bestsellers.

Find the other parts of our Literary Beach Books series here.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be doing a series of recommendations for (semi-)intellectual summer reading. Each of these posts will suggest four or five enjoyable page-turners that won’t leave you feeling intellectually lobotomized like certain popular bestsellers.

So if you like thoughtful, well-written novels, but still want to relax with a ripping good yarn this summer, tune in Mondays for the next few weeks to load up on great summer reads.

Here’s the first installment.

Serena, by Ron Rash

Serena is a straightforward novel about a logging camp in Depression-era North Carolina. Full of violence (both natural and man-made), betrayal, manipulation, and life lived ruthlessly, it features more than its share of can’t-put-it-down.

Rash doesn’t particularly try to be funny or entertaining, and he doesn’t use stylistic or structural gimmicks. Instead, he creates simple, serious drama and a driving, addictive narrative.

Suffice to say, if you’ve got a tolerance for violence and a fond memory of classic dramas like Lord of the Flies, this novel will drag you through its pages.

You can read my full review of Serena here.

The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway

This novel requires a little more focus than Serena. It’s not as simple or as fast a read (it weighs in at 500 pages), but the reward for your effort is a hilarious, riveting ride through a cool, futuristic hellscape. The Gone-Away World is my favorite kind of sci-fi: the kind that can balance a funny, action-packed plot with a cerebral foundation, without letting either overly dominate the reading experience.

Gone-Away‘s premise presents a post-apocalyptic band of mercenaries as they try to save the world. Not the most original setting there’s ever been, but Harkaway packs so much creativity and invention into the details that the story never feels stale.

If you’re a fan of sci-fi, comedy, or action, you’ll almost surely love this book. However, swing by my review (link below) to make sure you’re not driven insane by Harkaway’s odd style. About 10% of readers seem to have a severe allergic reaction to it.

Full review of The Gone-Away World, including a sample of Harkaway’s trademark style, here. You can find a PDF ebook of it here.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is my pick to win the Nobel Prize in 2036. His novels have been getting better and better, and I liked The Yiddish Policemen’s Union even better than Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

The only thing that might get in the way of Chabon’s Nobel bid is his commitment to creating compelling plots, which sometimes gets confused for Grisham-like non-literariness. For instance, Policemen is a murder mystery, which literary novels from Pulitzer Prize winners usually aren’t. However, it’s also the best murder mystery I’ve ever read, hands-down.

The premise is involved, to say the least: after World War II, the nation of Israel wasn’t created, and instead the U.S. government set up a settlement for displaced Jews in Sitka, Alaska. Fifty years later, the lease is about to expire and the Sitka Jews have nowhere to go. Set against this backdrop, Detective Meyer Landsman sets out to solve a murder that turns out to be a whole lot more.

Policemen isn’t particularly short, and its plot will require a little attention, but if you like detective stories and well-written character fiction, this novel offers the best of both those worlds. It might well be your new favorite book.

Find a used copy at Powell’s online here.

The Thought Gang, by Tibor Fischer

The Thought Gang is about a philosophy professor who starts robbing banks. Its structure resembles a stitched-together series of riffs moreso than a proper novel, but even so, it’s a thoroughly entertaining read.

There’s a convincing intelligence in Fischer’s writing, his characters are funny and compelling, and his riffs are endlessly entertaining

Much like The Gone-Away World, this book has a distinct style that defines the feel of the reading experience. It’s not for everybody, but if you like it, The Thought Gang is great fun. Here’s the first paragraph of the novel:

The only advice I can offer, should you wake up vertiginously in a strange flat, with a thoroughly installed hangover, without any of your clothing, without any recollection of how you got there, with the police sledgehammering down the door to the accompaniment of excited dogs, while you are surrounded by bales of lavishly-produced magazines featuring children in adult acts, the only advice I can offer is to try to be good-humoured and polite.

Reading this book is kind of like studying for a vocab quiz while you watch The Untouchables. Except add a whole lot of funny. It’s a quick, thrilling read, and a great introduction to an author that doesn’t get a lot of press in America.

The $19.75 that Amazon’s asking is a bit steep, but Powell’s is much more reasonable.