Beach Reads for Every Mood

Lana del Rey Dark Beach

‘The Hour of the Star’ by Clarice Lispector

A weird little novella that is perfect for consuming in one long, languorous lounge on the sand, The Hour of the Star seems like a depressing read on its face. It centers on a poor young typist living in Rio de Janeiro whose life is cruel and small. But in meditating on this one woman cast aside by Brazilian society, Clarice Lispector produces something that reads more like a poem than a story. I reread it often and always come away feeling remarkably at peace with the world. —Catherine Thompson

$12.95 at Amazon

$12.95 at Bookshop

‘The Fall Guy’ by James Lasdun

Matthew, our point-of-view character, is at loose ends professionally, lucky to be taken in by his rich cousin Charlie and Charlie’s beautiful wife, Chloe, for a summer sojourn at their gorgeous Catskills retreat. He wants Chloe, who lightly encourages his advances, but in Charlie’s absence Matthew learns that Chloe has a secret lover with whom he then becomes obsessed. The languid mood of this literary thriller about rich people on vacation is pervasive and infectious. There’s a deeply dark heart and more than a few violent twists in the second and third acts of this novel, but what stays with me are its poetic, evocative descriptions of long days spent poolside at a beautiful house with mountain views among beautiful people in luxurious clothing eating delicious snacks. —Emily Gould

$15.95 at Amazon

$15.95 at Bookshop

‘Exalted’ by Anna Dorn

Exalted is the name of the astrology-meme Instagram account run by Emily, a 29-year-old with a claustrophobically small Los Angeles life that revolves around maintaining her outsize online presence. She supports herself by doing chart readings and writing listicles like “The Signs As Thanksgiving Dishes”; lives on sliced turkey, Mountain Dew, and hits from her weed vape; frequents a burlesque club to satisfy her basic human-contact needs; and has a distant relationship with her parents, who live in a sunny L.A. suburb. Chapters narrated by Emily are interspersed with chapters narrated by Dawn, a middle-aged lesbian who parties too hard and has a semi-estranged son, Bo. Their worlds collide when Emily’s faith in astrology’s power is briefly restored by her encounter with a client’s perfect chart, which leads her on a hunt for the surely perfect person whose stars are so aligned. Druggy and full of tawdry, burnt-out L.A. glamour, this is an ideal page-turner for a day spent in proximity to the Pacific Ocean. —E.G.

$27 at Amazon

$27 at Bookshop

Alone In a Foreign Country

‘Hot Milk’ by Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk is not a thriller, but there’s an almost electric undercurrent of existential dread pulsing underneath this novel that will hook you. The protagonist, Sofia, accompanies her ill mother to a mysterious clinic on the sunbaked Spanish coast, and the novel only gets stranger and moodier from there as Sofia drifts in search of who she is apart from her mother’s caretaker. Equally perfect to read on a stormy summer day or under the oppressively hot sun. —C.T.

$17.99 at Amazon

$17 at Bookshop

‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead’ by Olga Tokarczuk

A whodunit about the powerful, brutish men in a village on the Czech-Polish border who keep dying violent, mysterious deaths and the eccentric astrologer who’s trying to solve their murders. It’s a good entry point into Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk’s work and the best book I’ve ever read while lying on a beach in Sicily. —Jordan Larson

$18 at Amazon

$18 at Bookshop

Smooth Every Wrinkle Out of My Brain

‘A is For Alibi’ by Sue Grafton

It doesn’t matter which letter of the alphabet you choose; what you’ll get when you enter the world of dogged California P.I. Kinsey Millhone is sheer mind-erasing coziness. Sure, there are bound to be murders, suspenseful moments, and mysteries to be solved. But there will also be endless descriptions of Kinsey’s practical outfits, workout routines, weird single-gal snacks, and perfectly comfortable independent life in her cleverly converted garage studio apartment with its sleeping loft. Kinsey is just as happy solving crimes as she is filing away invoices and typing up notes on her trusted electric typewriter, and the books always devote plenty of pages to these soothing quotidian details while still keeping the reader turning pages to learn the mystery’s always-satisfying conclusion. Truly, they are perfect reading experiences, gifts to anyone who needs to have their brain temporarily stilled completely. It’s a tragedy that Sue Grafton didn’t live long enough to get to Z. —E.G.

$17.99 at Amazon

$17.99 at Bookshop

‘A Court of Thorns and Roses’ by Sarah J. Maas

You’ve been curious. Your sister’s best friend is obsessed with them. A group chat of your college friends kept texting about them, and now you don’t see their discussion anymore because they’ve spun it off into a separate group chat. Every single time you go past a Barnes & Noble there is a woman standing at the cashier, holding not just one but three books in the series. So what the hell, it’s beach week — why not try some Sarah J. Maas?

This is a good decision! Generally when people describe reading something as feeling like a lobotomy they mean it in a derogatory way, but this is exactly wrong. A Court of Thorns and Roses, which is the SJM series you should start with, will envelop you in the glorious brain-deadening sensation of complete surrender, and every time your mind tries to struggle against moments of silliness or nonsensical world-building, your lizard-brain pleasure centers will fight back. You especially want to be doing this on vacation because the real hook of these books is the one-two punch of going from book one to book two, and if you only read the first one you’ll miss out on the full appeal of the dark fairy daddy whom TikTokers have been using as the inspiration for all their knee tattoos. Plus, summer should be fun! Fun and freeing and unabashed. You could try to pretend it’s not fun to enjoy girlboss heroine Feyre surrendering to the fairy realm she first thought was evil and then discovers is full of wonder, but just like Feyre, you’d be deceiving yourself. (But also, you can skip book four.) — Kathryn VanArendonk

$19 at Amazon

$19 at Bookshop

‘The Perfect Couple’ by Elin Hilderbrand

Like so many Hilderheads, I first read an Elin Hilderbrand novel while visiting someone else’s vacation home. I needed something to read, and Here’s To Us — her novel about a Guy Fieri But Make Him a Sexy Bad Boy chef whose exes come together in Nantucket for the reading of his will — was simply there, like the nanny named Fran. Almost as soon as I had picked it up from the bookshelf and opened it, I had finished reading. Next, I grabbed her other book on the shelf — The Identicals (Hilderbrand, a twin herself, has a thing for twins at an impasse) — and began downloading more on my Kindle. Why do they work? There’s romance, but the objects of affection are secondary. More crucial are the vividly described food, homes, and other suggestions of what we now call “quiet luxury.” Sandwiches from Something Natural, blue fish pâté from 167 Raw, and cold Sancerre “devoured” on either Hinckley picnic boats or picnics on mostly empty beaches. Sometimes there’s a murder to solve to move things along, but the sell is escapism. To vicariously go on a fancier vacation than the one you’re on right now. Or better: to not just vacation, scraping together your measly PTO days, but to summer as a verb. I’d start with The Blue Bistro, probably her best upstairs-downstairs story about a hostess at a fancy beachfront restaurant, or The Perfect Couple, a murder mystery and the basis of a Nicole Kidman adaptation coming to Netflix on September 5. —Marisa Carroll

$19.99 at Amazon

$19.99 at Bookshop

I Finally Have Time to Commit to a Series

The ‘Wolf Hall’ Trilogy by Hilary Mantel

These books are long as hell but also really great and engrossing, full of intricate historical detail. They are best absorbed in one bingey sitting rather than piecemeal over the course of months, because that’s the only way you’ll be able to keep the characters, a staggering proportion of whom are named Thomas, and their agendas straight. So if you have an 18-hour flight, or just a few blissfully empty beach days, load up your carry-on with some tomes about Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VII! In the first book alone, Cromwell survives the tragic death of his wife and young daughters and runs interference between his boss, Cardinal Wolsey, and his ultimate boss, King Henry, as the whole “annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragorn so that he can marry Anne Boleyn” thing goes down. Cromwell nimbly plays diplomatic games that have him running circles around his fellow courtiers, and it’s easy to get fully engrossed in all the sensory detail Mantel brings to her depiction of the 1500s, which of course mostly smelled bad. By the second book, the king has moved on from Anne to Jane Seymour, whom Thomas vows to help become queen, thereby punishing Anne’s allies, who had previously sided against Wolsey. If this is already seeming like a lot, rest assured that it all plays out at a rapid enough clip that you can follow events without getting too bogged down in the details. The books themselves are doorstops, but I still encourage you not to read them on your phone; you’ll want to do some flipping around to confirm which Thomas is which, and also they’re a calming physical presence. As a plus, whenever you hear anything about Thomas Cromwell in the future you’ll always think of Thailand or wherever you were headed on that long flight. —E.G.

$20.99 at Amazon

$20.99 at Bookshop

The Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros

This best-selling series deserves the hype. It’s not just about a dragon-flying academy where most of the students die. It’s about a horny dragon-flying academy where most of the students die! Our heroine is Violet Sorrengail, a scrappy underdog who shows everyone, including her absolute most detested person in the world, Xaden, how badass she is when she bonds to not one but two dragons. Plot twist, her dragon is bonded to his dragon! How much longer can their deep-seated enmity last before their passionate hatred turns to passionate lust? Like 200-something pages, but if you enjoy a slow burn, the payoff is worth it. The second book in the series sets up a rebellion against the government of the country that runs the dragon academy, with many of its students unexpectedly rebelling and taking part, including Violet and Xander, who have been kept apart by plot machinations for most of the book (but when they do find time to get together, again, worth it). Much hotter than you’d expect given the baseline YA-ness of the initial hundred or so pages. (“I gasped when I saw the word ‘clit’!” my friend texted me). The third volume of the series doesn’t come out till next year, which is frustrating, but also gives us something in 2025 to look forward to. —E.G.

$24.5 at Amazon

$29.99 at Bookshop

Sex! (But Make It Literary)

‘Call Me by Your Name’ by Andre Aciman

First, if you’ve seen the movie, please erase it from your mind. Now, dive in fresh to the story of Elio, a 17-year-old living in a beautiful house in Italy with his parents who’s consumed with lust for his family’s houseguest, a 24-year-old American academic named Oliver who has a kind of insouciant self-possession that the awkward but beautiful (and heretofore straight) Elio aspires to possess for himself. Told in retrospect, the book is filled with a sense of pervasive longing, not only Elio’s longing for Oliver but the narrator’s — an older, wiser Elio — longing to somehow re-experience the moment of youthful innocence and transgression that can only happen once in a lifetime. I recall crying the first time I finished this book, one of the few times I can remember the written word moving me to tears. And if that’s not hot, what is? Of course they also do it a lot, and there’s that thing with the peach. —E.G.

$18 at Amazon

$18 at Bookshop

‘Green Wheat’ by Colette

This book is a little bit hard to find but is worth seeking out (Abebooks usually has copies). It’s a late-career masterpiece inspired by the author’s affair with her second husband’s then-teenage son, which, I’m sorry, is rendered exquisitely hot in fiction. The whole thing takes place in the south of France. Teenagers Philippe and Vinca have grown up going to the seaside together, doing innocent things like fishing for prawns and roaming the fields, but this summer they’re older and the sex thing has entered the picture. Then Philippe’s world is rocked by an older woman who seduces him. The whole thing is a sensory vacation to an idyllic, untainted seaside place, and every tactile detail is evoked in all its particularity by Colette, who is a master at evoking every minute sight, smell, sound, and facial expression in a way that situates you exactly in that particular sun-dazzled landscape. The perfect read for when you’re trying to pretend that your day at Jacob Riis is actually a sparkling, sensually burgeoning season spent on the coast of Brittany. —E.G.

$14.95 at Amazon

I’m Going to Be Distracted By My Kids the Whole Time

‘We Are Never Meeting in Real Life’ by Samantha Irby

In all of Irby’s collections — Meaty; We Are Never Meeting in Real Life; Wow, No Thank You; and Quietly Hostile — you’ll be introduced to the inimitable voice of the essayist and TV writer — profane, casual, inviting, and also capable of great tenderness and depth. She plumbs her life’s misfortunes for laughs that come out of sometimes objectively tragic situations: her neglected childhood, her chronic IBS, her longtime day job at a vet clinic. She’s always finding literal lols in the mundane. Good news for people who are going to be glancing up from the page a lot to make sure that no one’s drowning: These essays are short and forgiving, and you won’t be out of the loop if you miss a page or lose your spot. —E.G.

$17 at Amazon

$17 at Bookshop

‘Dear Girls’ by Ali Wong

Framed as advice to her very young daughters, Wong’s book actually shouldn’t be read by anyone under the age of, say, 30 — it’s dirty as hell, but it also concerns itself mainly with the hilarious but very real indignities of pregnancy, childbirth, and early postpartum. There’s one indelible essay about the various fluid-leaking mishaps that ensue during an outing to the zoo with a toddler and a newborn that struck me as one of the most detailed documents I’ve ever read about this fleeting but intense period when your life revolves all too urgently around the amount of emergency extra onesies and wipes you’ve managed to shove into your bag. For those who have safely emerged from this phase of parenting with some of their sanity intact, it’s almost a welcome throwback — like, Yes, that really did happen, and it was as bad as I remembered it. It’s all, from Wong’s perspective, somehow immensely funny, which you’d want to expect from a comedian’s memoir but we all know that sometimes that quality of showmanship doesn’t always translate onto the page. Here, blessedly, it does, and then some. —E.G.

$18 at Amazon

$18 at Bookshop

‘The Striker and the Clock’ by Georgia Cloepfil

In this rapid-fire but profound book of easily gulpable vignettes, Cloepfil, a former pro soccer player who played overseas and had an ambivalent experience but loves the game itself, writes a memoir told in 90 short sections (like the 90 minutes in a game of soccer). Absolutely perfect for when you can’t take your eyes off the action around you for more than a brief moment at a time but still want to have a book in your hand. —Emma Alpern

$27 at Amazon

$27 at Bookshop