The tourists are arriving in droves. Traffic is backed up on Ocean Avenue, and the noobs congregate on the mild swells to try their hand at surfing. It is officially summer in Santa Cruz. Vacationers seek the ubiquitous “beach reads” like the holy grail.
Beach read?
I actually had to look up what a beach read is because I wasn’t sure. A lot of websites publish lists of “beach reads for summer 2018”. See examples: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4.
Here is what I’ve decided. Beach reads are books that people read for pleasure. This actually seems counterintuitive to me. Don’t people read for pleasure all the time? Then I realized that maybe this is one of the reasons that I have met a lot of people who wished they read more books. Is it because they think they should be reading more personal development books or classics? Or do they think they should only be reading great literary works?
Year-round beach reading for the win!
Most of the books I read could probably be categorized as “beach reads”. I love genre fiction. My favorites are a good mystery, or a well written fantasy novel, and I have even been dabbling in sci-fi and thrillers. I also occasionally read a personal development book, a classic, or a great literary work, but I read in those genres much less often than I read other types of fiction. Really, I feel that reading should be a pleasurable activity, and most of the time I don’t want to read something heavy. Typically, the question is how to spend my spare time? Do I pick up a book or watch a TV show? I “binge read” a series over the last couple of weeks. I don’t actually remember the last time I binged a tv series.
During my first term at college I stopped reading all fiction. It was terrible. Most of the way through the term I was stressed and unhappy and I picked up a Clive Cussler novel and read the whole thing in about 24 hours. I learned an important lesson that term. Reading for pleasure is super important for me. Diving into a good story keeps me sane. And, reading books because they are “good for me” is absolutely the path to misery. I enjoy my beach reads, and I rarely am reading them on vacation.
