Reading Glasses - Fan Group discussion

This week, Brea and Mallory defend the much maligned term "beach read", review some weird reading glasses and debate book sharing. The hashtag #TakeBackBeachRead was used to encourage participation.

Like Brea and Mallory, I don't know that I'd be able to book share. (Thankfully, my husband is not into reading, so the books are all mine, mwahahaha! ) I'd say that's why the publisher prints tons of copies -- get yer own!

Book sharing wouldn't work for me either. I like having my own stuff. I usually pass books on when I'm done with them but I know that's not the same thing.

Beach reads for me are not necessarily what others might think of as the same. I think books with fast moving plots work as a beach read. One I just read that I would say is a beach read is A Dog's Way Home.

I've learned through hard experience not to book share. other people just don't respect books. they've returned them to me torn, months late, and lost dust jackets. never again

I'm not very good with sharing books. My reading style tends to involve reading three or four books at once, constantly jumping back and forth between books.
Cozy mysteries tend to be my favorite beach reads. I once had a professor who would make snide comments about me, or people in general, reading books of "little substance" so it was nice to hear a podcast defending beach reads.

Fortunately, my husband and I like many of the same kinds of books. In fact, he's pretty good at guessing whether I'll like a book he has read. So vacations are made easier because of that--only one suitcase of books, rather than two!

You know, it's funny; I've always thought of "beach reads" as being kind of generic mindless thrillers. Probably goes back to this Terry Pratchett quote, from The Last Continent:

It is a simple universal law. People always expect to use a holiday in the sun as an opportunity to read those books they've always meant to read, but an alchemical combination of sun, quartz crystals and coconut oil will somehow metamorphose any improving book into a rather thicker one with a name containing at least one Greek word or letter (The Gamma Imperative, The Delta Season, The Alpha Project and, in the more extreme cases, even The Mu Kau Pi Caper). Sometimes a hammer and sickle turn up on the cover. This is probably caused by sunspot activity, since they are invariably the wrong way round.

More generally, I've always interpreted "beach reads" as "low-effort books with broad generic appeal rather than any distinguishing quality." Books people buy as safe bets rather than out of any particular interest. As you say, it's very similar to "airport books" -- books you buy in an airport. Regardless of what book it is that you buy, the fact that you're buying it at the airport paints it much more as "ho hum, I've got a bunch of time to kill, how shall I occupy myself" than as "this particular book is one that grabs my attention."

I'm not knocking any particular book labelled as a beach read, nor how awesome it is to have a book that's just relaxing and low-effort and fun! BUT, what does bewilder me a little is the idea of recommending beach reads or airport books as such. It feels kind of self-contradictory. If your purpose in buying a book is as a last-moment purchase to while away some time, I kind of feel like pickiness is not where you're at right now. If a beach read is something defined by being pretty generic, so that anybody can pick it up off a shelf without too much thought, then recommending something specific as being really good at being generic seems... weird?

Obviously, you can recommend a good thriller as being a good thriller, or a good novel about women doing pastel-colored woman-y stuff as being, oh what's that called, a good novel. It's touting it as "a good generic low-effort read" that confuses me. Like, what would be a bad beach read?