The Wrong Beach Reading

Today I was perusing Amy of Fraught's post about her recent vacay weekend, and how she wound up reading a heavy memoir of addiction during what was supposed to be a boozy girls' getaway. Then Gretchen chimed in and said that she'd once packed The Bell Jar as her reading for a beach trip. Downer.

This made me think about the time I set off on a nineteen-hour Greyhound bus ride with only Henry James's The Ambassadors. I defy you to read that on a Greyhound bus. It cannot be done.

(Actually, I probably have a couple of friends who could manage it. You know who you are.)

The things we require of a beach read and a of Greyhound bus read are different, probably. Maybe. Mainly I require that I never again be on a Greyhound bus. But it got me thinking.

I asked Matt what his biggest beach reading mistake was. He knew right away. "It was the time I started reading that awful James Patterson book," he said. We must share a brain, because I remembered the exact time he was talking about. It happened in the late 90's. I said, "You mean the one that begins by narrating the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby?" He said, "Yes, ugh, I was like, 'What is this crap, murder porn?'"

If all of life were a high school yearbook, Matt would be Least Likely to Read An Entire James Patterson Thriller. But I reminded him that for most people, that's exactly the kind of book they read at the beach. I am sure that dog-eared James Patterson paperbacks are lining the pressed-wood bookcases of thousands of rented beach houses up and down the shores of this great land.

He dug deeper. "Okay, once I took Linear Algebra to the beach." I said, "Um, good night, why did you do that?" He said he'd been studying it, but admitted that he didn't actually get any linear algebra done that week. Nonetheless, I was all, NERD NERD LOOK AT THE NERD! HEY FOUR-EYES! Like I didn't already know that.

So I wanted to ask y'all, what unfortunate or improbable vacation-reading choices have you made? Or what was a perfect, memorable match of vacation with book experience?

I find the whole topic of beach reading so crammed full of memory and desire. Do you get me? Like, I remember that I started reading the Harry Potter series at the beach. I remember that I read John Fowles's The Magus at the beach. PERFECT BEACH BOOK. I remember that once, Matt's brother and mother were each reading The Da Vinci Code, and I offered ten dollars to the first person to finish a copy and give it to me. This makes me laugh now. But it was a good beach read, despite not being a very good book.

And speaking of beach readers, it does not get any more major league than Matt's family. They come to read and they do not eff around. Seriously. They each arrive with a stack of books, having discussed and outlined their week's reading plan on the way to our destination, and then they hit it hard. They read, with absolutely athletic focus and determination, all the day long, while eating, while rocking on the porch, while sunning. I had always thought I was a great reader, but damn. They are the bigs.