Top 10 Best Summer Beach Reads

Ah, summer!

A time for beaches and . .  . beach reads!

Come on, you know that nothing connects a person better than reading a good book with your feet in the sand. 

I mean, who doesn’t love those books that give you that lazy summer vacation feeling near the shore? 

So if you’re planning on heading to the beach anytime soon, be sure to pack one of these great reads with you in your bag:

1) Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Walter’s story about a love affair that starts on the Italian coast in 1962 is an artful matrix of locales and characters. When a beautiful blond American actress, Dee Moray arrives alone by boat to the fictitious town of Porto Vergogna, she captures the attention of Pasquale Tursi. Pasquale aspires to turn the village into a resort town after dropping out of college to take care of his recently widowed mother and their hotel. The book moves back and forth in time, telling the story of each of the five characters that interact with the others and revolving around the events that take place in Porto Vergogna 50 years later. The book itself opens like a move, and the pages are full of promises for an escapist storyline. More importantly, Beautiful Ruins highlights how even the most insignificant things in a person’s life can unwittingly impact the lives of many others.    

2)  The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

In May 1925, the legendary British explorer, surveyor and archaeologist Lt. Col. Percy Fawcett vanished along with his son Jack and their friend Raleigh Rimmell. It was Fawcett’s eight expedition to the Amazon. Beforehand – in the course of all his travels – Fawcett heard whispers of a kingdom in South America, a civilization overgrown and forgotten. He began spotting clues everywhere, in the customs of the natives, and in oral histories and legends. And thus, he is drawn to issue an expedition to discover this hidden city. Part biography, part detective story and party adventure tale, Grann recreates the great age of exploration in The Lost City of Z. But what makes Fawcett’s story all the more intriguing is the uncertainty of his fate. Was he murdered by hostile natives? Did he starve to death? Did they “go native” willing and decided to remain in the jungle? Or were they killed by the Amazon’s ravenous creatures? One will never know.

3) The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan

This collection of fiction and non-fiction writings was written while the author was a student at Yale. Keegan graduated on May 21, 2012, having already secured a job at The New Yorker and who had a play set to be produced. Five days later, she died in a car accident. These posthumous essays and stories by a young woman struck down in her prime is a lovely testament to life and love in The Opposite of Loneliness. In “Baggage Claim,’ a conversation between two people holds unspoken feelings. In “Hail, Full of Grace,” a young woman has returned home for the holidays with her adopted infant, and in “Stability in Motion,” Keegan writes about how her first car helped her become who she was. Keegan seems to understand (way beyond her years) the pain of the decision that you may not regret on a daily basis but that come back to haunt you when you least expect them.   

4) Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

The novel boasts a host of characters, each with their own distinct vernacular, and each with their own story to tell – stories that all come together to paint a picture of the precariousness of life during the civil war, as well as the tragedy of familiar loss. Saunders begins his story during and after the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, William “Willie” Wallace Lincoln, and examines the president’s grief at his loss. The bulk of the novel (which takes place over the course of a single evening) is set in the bardo, an intermediate space between life and the afterlife. Within the bardo, everyone that Willie’s spirit meets is a person that has died and been buried in the same cemetery as Willie. One of the spirits encourages Willie to pass on to the next stage of the afterlife, as they know that the bardo is a dangerous place of young people. Saunder’s writing is very intricate and precise with the chorus of voices in the bardo. Each narrator is equal in their presentation, and each is distinctive in their delivery. 

5) We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

This YA novel is about a wealthy family, the Sinclairs, who spend their summers on their grandfather’s private island, near Martha’s Vineyard. Cadence Sinclair is seventeen going on eighteen. She had an mysterious traumatic brain injury when she was fifteen that ultimately left her with amnesia. Much of the book details her friends and family encouraging to remember what happened two years ago on the island. Cadence particularly remembers the company of “The Lairs”: her cousins, Johnny and Mirren, as well as Gat, the nephew of Johnny’s mother’s boyfriend. The Lairs, including Cadence, are all about the same age; Johnny and Mirren are like the siblings Cadence never had, and Gat immediately steals Cadence’s heart. But something happened that summer when Cadence and Gat fell in love. Something that had some sinister relationship with Cadence’s accident. As Cadence ever-so-gradually begins to recall the events of that summer years ago, the reader discovers that all is not as it seems on the private island. Definitions of family, of loyalty and of acceptance are all deeply tested, and Cadence must redefine for herself what she believes in.

6) Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Anything written by David Sedaris is cause for jubilation. But Me Talk Pretty One Day may be just his most acclaimed novel ever. In his collection of essays, Sedaris gives his readers a glimpse into his hysterical and quirky childhood as an outsider in North Carolina. He explores his attempts to learn French when he decides to move to Paris; and in “You Can’t Kill the Rooster,” Sedaris draws a portrait of his brother who begins talking incessantly in hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. The focus is not so much on Sedaris’s family, but rather the anecdotes. Sedaris is endlessly dry, self-deprecating, and able to find the humor in any experience. 

7) Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Semple’s sharp and witty novel follows a young girl, Bee, as she pieces together emails, documents, and secret correspondences to find her mother, Bernadette. Bee is precocious, but strong and sweet, a nice counterpoint to her slightly unhinged mother. Bernadette, on the other hand, was an architect in Los Angeles, before she married moved to Seattle with her husband, Elgie. But one day she vanishes. Exploring themes of abandonment, anxiety, and complex familiar relationships, ​Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a fun and memorable beach read. 

8) Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

Based upon the incredible true story, Louis “Louie” Zamperini was always in trouble. But with the help of his older brother, he turns his life around and begins channeling his energy into running, later qualifying for the 1936 Olympics. When World War II breaks out, Louie enlists in the military. After his plane crashes in the Pacific , he survives 47 days in a raft, until his capture by the Japanese navy. Hillenbrand sketches the unreliable story of an undisciplined misfit who is on the search for redemption that will leave readers in awe. 

9) A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Ove is a curmudgeonly old man. He screams at his neighbors for parking in the wrong place and punches a hospital clown whose magic tricks annoy him. He’s planning to commit suicide until he strikes up an unlikely friendship with two chatty young daughters who move in next-door to him after they accidentally flatten his mailbox. The story moves back and forth between Ove’s childhood and his life as a fifty-nine-year-old man in Sweden. Ove leads a very fixed life, not necessarily taking pleasure in his formulaic way of doing things, but certainly deriving some sense of satisfaction or purpose from it. Backman does an outstanding job of illustrating the development of Ove’s grumpy demeanor from start to finish. 

​10) The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer

In The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, author and comedian Amy Schumer chronicles her past with stories about her teenage years, her family, relationships and shares the experiences that has shaped her to who she is. Schumer is clear that her novel is definitely not a memoir. She discusses everything from her hatred of watercress to her bowel movements before a show, that it is almost hard to imagine what else she could include in an autobiography. As you’d expect of a comedian of Schumer’s calibre, her writing is out loud hilarious and will leave a stitch in your side.  

Enjoy those beachy reads this summer.