Another summer, another round-up of my favorite beach reads–adult books, with no pictures and no grubby hands trying to rip a page out before you’re finished with it!
I’ve always been a big-time reader. When I was pregnant with my first kid, people kept saying to me: “You better get all your reading in now; you won’t have any time after he’s born!” That was among the other “you won’t have any times”: You won’t have any time to sleep, to cook a meal, to shave both legs in the shower, etc. etc.
For me, little babies and reading were actually a good mix. When both my son and daughter were newborns, I would rock them back and forth in the middle of the night, breastfeeding or giving them a bottle, and read my Kindle by its backlight in the dark room. That’s what I remember when I remember having little babies: The warm, fuzzy feeling of sitting in suspended time in the middle of the night, feeling their skin against mine, hoping to finish a chapter just as they finished their food. (Of course, that time was also tiring and frustrating and hard, but I try to focus on the warm fuzzies.)
Now that the middle-of-the-night feeding phase has passed, I read while I lie in bed with my almost 4-year-old son. He wants me to lie next to him while he falls asleep, and I do it because 1) he’s the boss, and 2) I like lying there, listening to his breath grow deeper, while I have my end-of-day reading time. That’s when I read so-called beach reads, because as a mother of two toddlers, I spend my time at the beach 1) applying sunscreen, 2) wiping every speck of sand off their feet because they “hate sand,” and 3) repeating steps 1 and 2.
Here are some of my favorite books from the last year or two, nearly all of which can be classified as “beach reads with substance”:
- You Were Always Mine by Christine Pride & Jo Piazza
- The Guncle by Steven Rowley
- Summer Stage and Vacationland by Meg Mitchell Moore
- The Darlings by Hannah McKinnon
- Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
- Last Summer at the Golden Hotel by Elyssa Friedland
- Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson
- Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
- The Sweet Spot by Amy Poeppel
- The Vibrant Years by Sonali Dev
- Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum (recommended to me by a friend, and maybe my favorite on this list)
- Community Board by Tara Conklin
- Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey
- The Sunshine Girls by Molly Fader
- School by the Sea Series (Welcome to the School by the Sea, Rules at the School by the Sea, Lessons at the School by the Sea) by Jenny Colgan
- Love, Lists & Fancy Ships by Sarah Grunder Ruiz
- Marrying the Ketchups by Jennifer Close
- Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl by Renee Rosen
- And, of course, The Hotel Nantucket and The Five-Star Weekend by the queen of beach reads herself, Elin Hilderbrand
Here’s another round of my favorite beach reads, from a few years ago.