Nothing makes a summer more awesome than a book that envelopes you in the heat and sweat and cool summer nights that come standard with July and August (pending where you live, of course). First, let's differentiate between a summer read and a beach read.
Summer Read
A book that drips summer. It makes you smell the ocean air, feel the sand between your toes, sweat with the heat and long for a pina colada and getting caught in the rain. No matter what time of the year you read a summer read, it'll wrap you in its little summer bubble and make you long for warmer times. If you're already in the midst of summer, like we are now, it'll make you want to quit work and live as a beach bum for a couple of months (and then go crawling back to your boss in September).
Beach Read
A beach read is a very light, simple, rather shallow book that could quite rightly get polished off on a day trip to the beach. It requires very little thinking to compute and you'll probably forget most of it before you even drop it in the sand when it's done. Unlike summer reads, beach reads are most like to be passed along or even left behind (don't litter, bastards!) and forgotten about as soon as the day ends. They're easy to skip from one to another and they often blend from one to the next.
Of course everyone's going to have different opinions on what's a summer read and what's a beach read. Not to mention not every summer read is actually a book set during the summer. Case in point - some of my favorite summer reads are my old school YA horror books. They bring me back to a time when my summers were still mine. I didn't have to work, I didn't have to go to school. I just had two months of summer to enjoy and they were often spent up late at night reading or putzing around on the internet (this was back in the day, on dial-up, they were long nights). Song of the Vampire by Carmen Adams is one of my favorite summer reads. I've reviewed it on this site and I've said it there and I'll say it again: I love it because it reminds me of The Lost Boys. It's set during the summer in a coastal town in California on a boardwalk with vampires. It's hard to disassociate that.
Not all of those YA horror books I have stacking up are set during summer nor are they all placed at the beach. But they remind me so much of my summers when I was younger that the association is too strong to ignore. When I read them I'm brought back to being curled up in my rec room late at night with a low light, crickets chirping outside and me getting freaked out with every little noise. So awesome.
Sea Change by Aimee Friedmann is a summer read for me. Now it's a book that's actually set during the summer, on an island at the beach. It's everything a summer read "should" be. I had a female MC that was strong-willed and carried the story, the premise made me think and at the same time I was still able to feel the water every time she went into the sea. I could smell the harbor and taste the seafood. OMG am I jonsing for some fresh salmon Wellington from the Santa Cruz Wharf. Only 2 more months before I can actually taste it again! But this story brings summer back and no matter when I read it, I can still feel summer.
Beach reads is the shit that barely sticks, for the most part. Your chincy supermarket romances, your Twilights of the world. Vampire Beach by Alex Duvall was very much a beach read for me. Aside from the fact that I didn't really enjoy the story, it was very shallow, required very little thinking and is best used for something to fill time that's distracted for half of it. It's one of those books that you can put down every few pages to run into the water or toss a Frisbee around, pick it up and continue on without missing a beat because there's no beat to miss. Most importantly, you don't mind putting it down. Even mid-chapter (as I know so many of us won't drop a book without at least finishing a chapter!), you'll put it down to collect sand and go off and do whatever. If it gets buried in the sand, you'll probably forget it's even there and pack up and leave without it (litterer!!!).
So what are your summer reads and your beach reads? If you're actually headed to the beach, do you prefer a summer read or a beach read? Does it depend on who you're going with?
