ZapTown

After a late Spring, It is finally Summer weather. Hot, unseemly humid, sticky warmth. A furnace that you lie down and go to sleep in, and wake up covered in sweat, too cooked to remember your dreams. Hot enough for you always to be running out of juice, of water, perhaps of beer. Hot enough for the coffeemaker on the counter to take on a sadistic edge. Hiking weather, biking weather, beach weather. Ah, summer! We may be in a troubled world, an era of rapid change, but hasn’t it always been so? Hasn’t there always been trouble, and change? A thousand years ago, monks were hunkering down in their robes, by the clear blue bowl of the ocean, to sit and enjoy the Summer breezes and read their tattered scrolls. Today, the beaches are more crowded, but the principle is the same. And as long as there is sand, and water, and warmth, there will be those who want to soak in it with a good book. Something that makes them think, but not too hard, perhaps. Something with pages that turn quickly, and something that conjures up vivid ideas, dreams or longings in their heart or their soul.

A lot of people I know who read have always tended to separate books into two categories—Summer reads ‘for the beach’, and ‘real’ books, presumably read when you’re huddled around the fire in the middle of Winter, trying to stave off eternal night. The only other difference seems to be that books meant ‘for the beach’ are paperbacks more often than not, often best-selling paperbacks (easier to transport that way) and that, if you’re worried your friends are going to turn up their noses at you for reading the latest Dan Brown novel, you can always claim it’s ‘for the beach’ and get away with it that way, somehow. Then again, this Summer, there is a group of David Foster Wallace fans who have apparently formed a book club/pact with the express purpose of reading INFINITE JEST over the Summer (for anyone who hasn’t, the idea is that this is a good time to do so). And that book is over a thousand pages of polysyllable and endnote!

Another option for those looking for a beachfront literary experience that’s also unique would be ON THE BEACH, a downbeat apocalyptic novel by Nevil Shute, written in 1957, about the last survivors of a Nuclear War who had fled to Australia and were waiting for the radiation to catch up to them. The book was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck, but has been largely forgotten, tied to the Cold War of the mid-20^th century, as one of the many ‘doomsday’ scenarios circulating through the 1950′s, if a bit more meditative than most. The pace of the novel, in Shute’s careful, dry prose is almost languid, with the survivors of the human race going about their business as the fallout from Nuclear War and the Northern Hemisphere gets closer and closer—the main dilemma for several of the characters is whether or not they will take their own lives or wait for the radiation to kill them. The main character (Peck’s Submarine Captain in the movie) even continues his search for other survivors. There’s a fatalism here, but also a strange optimism and commitment to duty that exists alongside it.

ON THE BEACH and INFINITE JEST are both striking, remarkable books—vastly different in plot and style, yes, but both of them offer vivid visions of humanity under exceptional circumstances that are mirrors to our own experience, in the past and in the present, and (hopefully) in the future. They might not be obvious candidates for Summer ‘beach’ reading, but they’re both worth sharing with the surf and the horizon, and worthy choices for the rucksack this July. What are your own offbeat choices for stretching out on a towel and reading in the sand?