Beach Reads For People Who Don’t Beach Read

Sun is good.  A cold Corona buzz is good.  Tanning up that pastiness is good.  Potential sunglass tan, not ideal but acceptable.  I like raccoons.  Bringing out some strategically colored, garishly fonted bestseller?  Reflects poorly.  Now, let me be clear.  It says nothing of your moral fiber, of your proclivity to be a good person.  It merely suggests that you are reading without really reading.  I’m just saying, man.  If you want, get down with this listy McListerson.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Yates wrote this book about suburban unrest, that psychological paralysis of the middle class we’re all now quite familiar with (American Beauty, Mad Men, your friend’s mom), but he did it a long time ago.  It’s genius.  Forget it was ever a movie.  Frank and April Wheeler live in Connect-ee-cut and life’s pretty dandy.  Frank has a decent job in the city and they have two children.  You know the drill.  But, then quietly, the couple’s psyches knot and unravel.  Like how a fearful pupil constricts then dilates.  There is an organic realism in these two characters, and Yates pushes them further and further, until they stand at the precipice of insanity and dissonance.  It’s a relentless pursuit of something that doesn’t exist (happiness, satisfaction, abstract nouns).  Hey, life’s going downhill, but it’s going to be awesome.

Drown by Junot Diaz

Diaz is a contemporary American fiction gangster, slinging out lines of street-hardened prose with impeccable rhythm.  Drown is his first (and so far, only) short story collection, and feels like a slap upside the head.  Diaz is a Dominican-American and he has set his stories in Jackson Heights and Jersey immigrant neighborhoods.  He’s bringing it to you in an unflinching kind of fiction that hits gritty, one after another.  Diaz splits his world open to write these stories, dragging out druggies and cripples, and sometimes you wonder if he’s crushed his own heart to tell us about it.

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Sure, maybe you read it in high school, but what did anyone get out of high school except some American Eagle jeans and an early drinking experience.  Time to go back.  Steinbeck is American Literature’s Zeus.  Yes, Zeus of the lightning persuasion.  Perhaps the plight of heartland Americans forced by the Great Depression and dust from their parched farms seems ill-fitted to a sandy lounge.  Here’s the thing though, the sun beats down on you as it beats down on the Joads, you sweat and they sweat, and there’s a strange exchange of energy between page and life.  There’s also Steinbeck’s depiction of startling human brutality and a palpable, visceral desperation hardwired into the story.  That’s just for fun.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Record scratch.  Non-fiction.  DFW.  What?  Opening essay is a 60 page play-by-play/hilariously judgmental/detail-oriented report of the Adult Film Awards [pause] and convention in Las Vegas.  Title essay asks the constantly proverbial: “Does our food have feelings?” but with the added “Does our food have free will?” twist.  Does it?  Does it?  Expect footnotes.